Women in the Work of Woody Allen 9789048550296

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part 1. Temptation, Destruction and Collapse
1 ‘The Woman Destroyed’ in Blue Jasmine
2 ‘New York Was His Town, and It Always Would Be…’ Narrative Storytelling and the Vexing Role of Women in Manhattan
Part 2 Art and the Family
3 Hannah and Her Father
4 Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the Politics of Toxic Female Friendship
5 ‘A Particularly Cruel Business for a Woman’
Part 3 Intertextuality
6 I Gotta Be Me
7 Negotiating ‘Dis-ease’
Part 4 Sound and Body
8 The Silent (Film) Woman
9 ‘Some Nights It’s the Only Game in Town’
Part 5 The Muse and Inspiration
10 Too Much, Too Young?
11 ‘She’s a Genius, and I Don’t Use That Word Casually’
12 Keaton and Allen
Index

Citation preview

Women in the Work of Woody Allen

Transgressive Media Culture Transgressive Media Culture publishes original monographs and exceptional edited collections that examine what is conceived to be beyond the limit, especially work that takes issue with this paradigm. From human trafficking and child sexual abuse, to conspiracy theories and cults, to the works of Lars Von Trier and other ground-breaking filmmakers, discourse on transgression dominates media culture, making this series necessary. While the focus is on transgressive media culture, this series engages fully with interdisciplinary areas and methodologies, including those drawn from sociology, psychology, philosophy and anthropology, producing original work by and for film and media scholars and beyond. The global scope of this work, with a transnational focus, is also key to its significance and contemporary relevance. Series Editors Jason Lee, De Montfort University, UK Editorial Board James Tangen, De Montfort University, UK Stuart Price, De Montfort University, UK Advisory Board Feona Attwood, University of Middlesex Juan José Cruz, Universidad de La Laguna Mark Griffiths, Nottingham Trent University James Kincaid, University of Southern California Xavier Mendik, Birmingham City University Balan Muthurajah, independent David Nash, Oxford Brookes University Atte Oksanen, University of Tampere Nycole Prowse, University of the Sunshine Coast David Punter, University of Bristol Will Self, Brunel University Ellen Wright, De Montfort University

Women in the work of Woody Allen

Edited by Martin R. Hall

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Cannes, France ‒ May 15, 2015: Emma Stone, Parker Posey & director Woody Allen at the gala premiere for their movie Irrational Man at the 68th Festival de Cannes © Jaguar Photo Services Cover design: Coördesign Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 292 6 e-isbn 978 90 4855 029 6 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463722926 nur 670 © Martin R. Hall / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

Introduction 7 ‘I’m interested in the relationships that women have with other women’ Martin Hall

Part 1  Temptation, Destruction and Collapse 1 ‘The Woman Destroyed’ in Blue Jasmine 17 Sophie Belot

2 ‘New York Was His Town, and It Always Would Be…’

Narrative Storytelling and the Vexing Role of Women in Manhattan John D. Ayres

33

Part 2  Art and the Family 3 Hannah and Her Father

Decoding the Eternal Feminine Dianah Wynter

55

4 Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the Politics of Toxic Female Friendship 79 Lauren Stephenson

5 ‘A Particularly Cruel Business for a Woman’

Nineteenth-Century Opera as Feminist Voice in Match Point Christopher Booth

99

Part 3 Intertextuality 6 I Gotta Be Me

The Remade Woman and Replaying the Woman’s Part in Woody Allen’s Movies Michael Newton

119

7 Negotiating ‘Dis-ease’

Jewish Women in the Work of Woody Allen Roberta Mock

139

Part 4  Sound and Body 8 The Silent (Film) Woman

167

9 ‘Some Nights It’s the Only Game in Town’

185

Sweet and Lowdown’s Mute Muse Steven Rawle

The Prostitute in Woody Allen’s Oeuvre Klara Stephanie Szlezák

Part 5  The Muse and Inspiration 10 Too Much, Too Young?

205

11 ‘She’s a Genius, and I Don’t Use That Word Casually’

225

12 Keaton and Allen

243

Woody Allen’s Life, Work and Women in the #MeToo Era Jason Lee

Elaine May’s Collaborative Relationship with Woody Allen Martin Hall

Collaboration and the Screwball Couple in Annie Hall and Manhattan Murder Mystery Claire Mortimer

Index 263

Introduction ‘I’m interested in the relationships that women have with other women’ Martin R. Hall One could say that, over the past ten years, women have created an entire field within film studies which is now producing some of the most stimulating, intelligent and exciting work going on and which has dramatically influenced the criticism of male writers as well. ‒ Ann E. Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera

Ann E. Kaplan’s influential book, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, makes some profound points and was a major driver of this edited volume looking critically at the work of one male filmmaker. Responding to the astute observations of authors such as Kaplan – who further suggested that ‘few books on film, whether written by men or by women, can now ignore issues of female representation’ (1983: iix) – this volume seeks to address the significant role of women in the work of Woody Allen. We specifically use the term ‘work’ as, in addition to Allen’s large body of films, his plays, stand-up and television work are considered here. The perspectives of a diverse group of authors have been brought together in these pages, authors who variously interrogate and analyze the multifaceted representations of women in these texts and in so doing for the first time evaluate the contributions made by women to the work of a problematic filmmaker. A critical reassessment of Allen’s output is needed, prompted by the recently resurfaced child abuse allegations regarding Woody Allen’s adopted daughter Dylan Farrow and a broader awareness as well as growing consciousness of issues surrounding gendered power structures in society. The subject of men writing women is an area of film studies that is largely on the periphery of scholarship, despite the fact that, as Sarah S.G. Frantz

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and Katharina Rennhak have pointed out, borrowing a phrase from Virginia Woolf, there are ‘innumerable books written by men about “the most discussed animal in the universe” [woman]’ (2010: 1). There are scholars who have written about the construction of women by male authors in both literature and the theatre but very little indeed in the world of cinema. In her book Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights and the Modern Stage, Gay Gibson Cima has suggested that ‘feminists herald Beckett’s genius at investigating the complexities of womanhood’ (1996: 215). This edited volume on women in the work of Woody Allen seeks to question to what extent this could be true for Allen’s work too. If, as Cima proposes, ‘male playwrights of genius can transcend gender boundaries and write “universal” women characters into their scripts’ (1996:1), we set out to interrogate whether there is any evidence for this authorship in the body of Woody Allen’s screen and stage work. Just as Cima’s book sought to reinstate the contributions of female actors within the modern theatre, this book attempts to emphasize the importance and significance of the women in the texts that follow. In addressing the distinct absence of work on men writing about women, it is important to consider those academic volumes that have considered the work of women writing about men. For example, there is Janet Todd’s book exploring female authors and male characters in literature, Men by Women (1981), wherein she suggests that: examining the ways in which female authors construct, manipulate, ignore, or experiment with the representation of the actions, emotions, and inner life of their male characters exposes the different but equally vital and telling perspectives of the construction of gender from that revealed by similar consideration of their female characters. (1981: 3)

Indeed, male authors over time have themselves constructed specif ic, and at times damaging, representations of women within literature, and this male perspective on the construction of gender is heavily scrutinized by the authors of this edited volume. Frantz and Rennhak reinforce this notion, referring to these male-authored female figures as ‘ideal femininity, thereby more often than not helping to form and strengthen the binary, patriarchal, gendered order’ (2010: 2). This, certainly, is something seen in the work of Woody Allen, but the question at hand is what variance there is and what differing range of examples there may be in the copious examples of women and women’s relationships in the texts that follow. Virginia Woolf

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also engaged with the convoluted question of looking at women in fiction by delving into what exactly was meant by it: The title ‘women and fiction’ might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. (1929: 9)

The subject of women and their relationships is a regular motif in Allen’s work. He himself has pointed out that ‘it became fun for me to write from the female point of view […] it was fresh’ (Allen quoted in Lahr 1996: 156). From mothers and daughters in Interiors (1978) and siblings in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) to wives, best friends, girlfriends, mothers, sex workers, evil queens and even the Devil’s mistress, some of the most influential and commanding actresses of stage and screen have worked alongside Allen: Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, Dianne Wiest, Madonna, Scarlett Johansson, Christina Ricci, Cate Blanchett, Dame Eileen Atkins and Emma Stone, to name but a few. This book puts the work of Woody Allen under academic scrutiny in the context of the current climate of the treatment of women in Hollywood. Following the Harvey Weinstein case, many male celebrities are being brought forward on charges of sexual harassment, including Woody Allen, who has again appeared in the press in relation to historic charges of molestation. Well within the #MeToo era, this edited volume brings together researchers to consider how women are represented further in the broader sphere of Hollywood cinema, to examine the notion of the male perspective on writing about women, and to explore the various approaches to relationships with and between women on screen. Through the lens of the work of Woody Allen, often probing the problematic consideration of the autobiographical nature of filmmaking, this book examines the role and representation of women in the broad works of Woody Allen, considering his films, plays, stand-up comedy and other writings. With more recent industrial attention towards the production of his work, notably Amazon Studios refusing to distribute the completed A Rainy Day in New York (2019), leading to Allen’s ‘breach of contract’ suit against the studio, an out-of-court settlement and a 2020 US release for the film, the work of Woody Allen is markedly problematic. But these films, of course, demand interrogation. Owing to the timeliness of this new book, given the contemporary issues with sexual harassment in the Hollywood system and with representations

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– both positive and negative – of women on screen, the contributors have been able to analyze and share new and diverse perspectives on a prolific filmmaker and to uniformly present a hitherto unexplored perspective on Woody Allen’s work with actresses and collaborators. Building upon Claire Dederer’s 2017 assertion in the Paris Review that ‘the film Manhattan is disrupted by our knowledge of Soon-Yi; but it’s also kinda gross in its own right; and it’s also got a lot of things about it that are pretty great. All these things can be true at once’, this work seeks to rationalize how indeed we can deal with the work of these problematic filmmakers and address the male auteur post-#MeToo. One of our aims, in recognizing the importance of perspectives addressing our engagement with the male auteur post-#MeToo, is to make accessible to students and non-specialists our recent critical and theoretical engagement with the women in the films and plays of Woody Allen. It has been the editor’s intention to develop new and important research and to make this information accessible to broader audiences. It has been noteworthy to see how authors have considered the roles of women behind the camera, with Woody Allen as a particularly compelling example. It has been said that there are many contemporary male filmmakers ‘who consciously seek out women editors citing the need for, and value of, a female perspective in the cutting room’ – including, of course, Woody Allen, ‘who has worked with women editors on every one of his films since Manhattan in 1979’ (Meuel 2016: 18–19). In fact, it can be argued, as many of the following chapters astutely do, that women actively augment and improve the work of an occasionally somewhat flawed director. Susan E. Morse arguably became a significant part of Allen’s signature itself owing to just how many of his films she worked on. For 20 years, Morse worked on the films of Woody Allen, even receiving nominations for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987) and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). David Meuel has written specifically of the balance that an editor like Morse can bring to the work of a filmmaker, pointing out that: Part of Morse’s great contribution to Allen’s work during all that time was, as film writer Ally Acker has noted, providing ‘rhythm and cohesion’ to a director’s style that is essentially ‘anecdotal and digressive’. (2016: 191)

The subject of women and their relationships is a consistent theme in Allen’s work. This provides a catalyst for discussing the roles of women and their treatment beyond the work of this one director, leading to research of a

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wide-ranging impact for many divergent research areas. It has been suggested that ‘In Hollywood films […] women are ultimately refused a voice, a discourse, and their desire is subjected to male desire’ (Kaplan 1983: 70). The following chapters seek to identify the voices that are to be found in Allen’s work, from collaboration and muse to intertextuality and artistry. The inherent conferring and sharing involved in producing this volume have ensured a coherence and quality across the collection. The editor has used a particularly light touch to edit the chapters in order to respect and reflect these vitally distinct works written from a wide range of important perspectives. The book comprises five distinct sections which in turn address key approaches to assessing the roles of women in Allen’s work from differing critical perspectives. The first section considers the notions of temptation, destruction and collapse, engaging with the question of whether the central presence of women in Allen’s films is a sign of his being sensitive to their needs and desires. The second section approaches Allen’s work through the lens of art and familial relationships, focusing on siblings and friendships and problematizing Allen’s female characters. The volume then moves on to the rich area of intertextuality in Allen’s work – from remaking the films of others to re-writing women and the broader view of the positioning of women within their overarching star texts throughout Hollywood. The fourth section considers more physical and physiological characteristics that hold metaphorical resonance for the women in these films – from body to sound, or lack thereof. Finally, the work culminates in a section considering women as muse and inspiration in both content and context for Allen’s films and plays – from inspiration and competition to ageing collaborators. Chapter 1 by Sophie Belot poses the significant question of whether the central presence of women in Allen’s films is a sign of his being sensitive to their needs and desires. With a focus on Blue Jasmine (2013), Belot suggests that the fragmented personality of Jasmine/Janine French could be read as a reflection of – and on – her objective/subjective subordination through a first masculine/feminine point of view. The second chapter then looks specifically at Manhattan. Here John Ayres suggests that, given the ubiquity of female characters in Allen’s work, it might be expected that authorial agency would be commonplace. Yet the situation is signif icantly more complicated, particularly in terms of the narrative aims for which female voiceover and narration – when present – are employed. Chapter 3, by D.E. Wynter, interrogates the philosophical masquerade of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), analyzing the film through the lens of ‘The Metaphor of

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Woman as Truth in Nietzsche’ and Riviere’s theories of feminine masquerade, problematizing Allen’s titular women characters, and questioning whether Hannah and her sisters are overt archetypes of the Eternal Feminine or resistive performative masquerades. Lauren Stephenson then analyzes the politics of toxic female friendship in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Stephenson discusses the terms under which the film chooses to explore friendship between women, regarding toxicity and competition as integral parts of its representation. Topher Booth, in Chapter 5, addresses nineteenth-century opera as feminist voice in 2005’s Match Point (2005), considering the unique ability of pre-existing music to manipulate film. Booth suggests that while on the surface the film questions socially grounded notions of divine justice, its quasi-Romantic narration criticizes normative tropes of masculinity in popular culture. In Chapter 6, Michael Newton turns his attention to Woody Allen’s conscious staging of female identity and the relations between men and women by remaking comedies that impressed and influenced the filmmaker in his youth, considering how Allen’s twenty-first-century take on the woman’s experience and his understanding of femininity are deeply rooted in the cinematic past. Roberta Mock then tackles the particularly autobiographical nature of Allen’s work by scrutinizing the star texts of Jewish actors in Allen’s films. This chapter focuses primarily on Julie Kavner and Scarlett Johansson and the ways in which their representation as Jewish women in Allen’s movies might be positioned within their overarching star texts throughout Hollywood. The chapter deals with the ease – or in this case, ‘dis-ease’ – of ‘dealing with’ the work of Woody Allen. Next, Steve Rawle interrogates the absence of the female voice and Samantha Morton’s nostalgic performance style to explore the ways in which the character Hattie in Sweet and Lowdown (1999) is at once a problematic inclusion in Allen’s cinema and a romanticization of the female performances of silent cinema. Rawle considers Morton’s performance as a lead female character who does not speak as an anomaly in Allen’s oeuvre. In Chapter 9, Klara Szlezak examines the diverse kinds and roles of prostitute characters in Allen’s work. This chapter investigates the various perspectives on the image of ‘the fallen woman’ that Allen’s writing provides. Taking into account the frequency with which prostitutes make an appearance in Allen’s writings, the chapter investigates such diverse issues as the use of stereotypes, the reconciliation of the serious and problematic with the humoristic, and the gender constellations in scenarios in which love and sex are for sale. Chapter 10 sees Jason Lee delve into the work of Woody Allen in the explicit context of the accusations of child abuse and

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paedophilia levelled against the filmmaker. Many of Allen’s best-known works have the central character, played by Allen, in a relationship with a much young woman. In these roles, the filmmaker self-consciously asks questions about the legitimacy of such relationships and thus publicly engages with these questions through artistic methods. In Chapter 11, Martin Hall analyzes the evident and powerful influence that Elaine May has had on the work of Woody Allen. Some of the most influential and commanding actresses of stage and screen have worked alongside Allen, yet what is often overlooked is the presence and influence of Elaine May both on stage and on screen as influence and collaborator. In Chapter 12, Claire Mortimer examines the fertile relationship between Allen and Diane Keaton, questioning her status as a ‘muse’ and analyzing how her performance style and creative involvement in their films together evolved over a quarter of a century. The intention behind the curation of this collection was to make a significant contribution to the field of independent American cinema studies and the exploration of the screen through critical perspectives on gender, feminism and sexuality fundamentally fuelled by a post-#MeToo awareness. As yet, no extensive scholarly work has been conducted on the roles of women in the films of Woody Allen in particular, and as such, the book intends to develop a novel angle on an already well-studied filmmaker. There is indeed a timeliness that further makes this work particularly necessary in that it dials into the current critical discourse and acknowledges current socio-cultural trends and discussions within academia and within society at large.

Bibliography Dederer, Claire. (2017). What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? Paris Review, 20 November 2017: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/ art-monstrous-men/ Cima, G.G. (1996). Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights and the Modern Stage. New York: Cornell University Press. Franz, S. and Rennhak, K. (eds.) (2010). Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750–2000. London: Lexington Books. Kaplan, E. Ann. (1983). Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. London: Routledge. Lahr, John. (1996). The Imperfectionist. In Robert Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (Eds.), Woody Allen: Interviews (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi).

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Meuel, D. (2016). Women Film Editors: Unseen Artists of American Cinema. New York: McFarland. Todd, J. (1989). Men by Women. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Woolf, V. (2020) [1929]. A Room of One’s Own. London: Renard Press Limited.

About the Author Martin Hall is a Senior Lecturer and the Course Leader for Film Studies and Media & Communication for the School of Humanities, Religion and Philosophy at York St. John University. He has published widely on the work of Woody Allen and has published on many other aspects of the American cinema with a focus on the 1960s and 1970s.

Part 1 Temptation, Destruction and Collapse

1

‘The Woman Destroyed’ in Blue Jasmine Sophie Belot

Abstract Pondering whether the central presence of women in Allen’s films is a sign of his being sensitive to their needs and desires, Richard Feldstein (1989) refers to this position as ‘a myth’. If there is a woman Allen can be identified with, it would be Simone de Beauvoir, who, in The Woman Destroyed (1967), considers self-reflectively the myths that condition women and drive them into despair and personal disintegration. The fragmented personality of Jasmine/Janine French could be read in Allen’s film Blue Jasmine as a reflection of and on her objective/subjective subordination through a first masculine/feminine point of view (Allen/ French). Keywords: myth, feminism, de Beauvoir

how I only hear and see what I want to … – Woody Allen

The above quote by Woody Allen relates to his reflection on women and, I would add, also represents his self-projection on women in his films, especially Jasmine in one of his major films, Blue Jasmine (2013). In 1993, Tim Carroll published Allen’s biography bearing the title Woody and his Women, which attempts to unravel Allen’s obsessive attitude to women. Allen has recurrently been criticized for his complicated relationships with women in his films, above all when they play the central character. Just mentioning the title of a recent article – ‘“It’s complicated

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really”: Women in the Films of Woody Allen’ by Joanna Rapf 1 – suffices to highlight the overall tendency in the ongoing discussion on representations of women in Allen’s work. According to Rapf, the complication finds its source in his f ilms’ self-referentiality and self-reflexivity, which either encapsulates women in a male gaze or allows for a feminist challenge to be conceived. The eponymous heroine of one of his later films, Blue Jasmine, is a case in point, as she incarnates this ambivalence. Jasmine represents the contemporary female character in turmoil, as signified by her fragmented solitary talking on the plane in the film’s opening scene. In turmoil and in transit, between New York and San Francisco, is a condition that seems to fit the description of Jasmine’s identity, as she is first seen going West (to San Francisco) to start a new life. The notions of authenticity/inauthenticity could be applied to Jasmine’s personality, especially as Allen’s penchant for existentialism has already been confirmed by scholars such as Zachary Ingle (2015). An existentialist approach defines authentic life as ‘thinking carefully for oneself about what is true and right, rather than passively accepting, in an effort to get along and fit in, what others think’ (Detmer 2013: 464). Leaving behind a lifestyle founded on inauthenticity, her borrowed expression – ‘going West’ – betrays her deterministic approach to re-inventing her-self. Indeed, Jasmine still seems to hang on to a romantic and dominant image of the wife devoted to her husband’s career despite her late husband’s affairs and dodgeries resulting in the loss of her-self. This study will focus on Jasmine’s tantrums as providing the flavour for the film’s fragmented structure, for the film narrative is permeated by flashbacks whose subjective-objective origins bring to the fore the relation between Jasmine and Allen as the auteur. Allen projecting himself onto his female protagonists is a recurrent characteristic of his auteurist cinema defined by its self-reflexivity and (self-)referentiality. References to existential philosophy inform his auteurist position and his self-projection onto the persona of the broken woman whose origin is to be found, I will suggest, in Simone de Beauvoir’s writing in The Woman Destroyed (1967). Attempting to fathom a strong parallel with de Beauvoir’s existential insight concerning her female-focused narrative and style, I will argue that Allen’s film, Blue Jasmine, portrays a broken wo-man. For, following de Beauvoir, he in fact focuses on the breakdown of a false image created by illusion and perpetuated by self-deception. The fragmented personality of Jasmine could thus be read as a reflection of, 1 Rapf borrows this expression – ‘It’s complicated, really’ – from Dianne Wiest when talking about Allen’s affinity with women.

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and on, her subordination through the merging of a first-person masculine/ feminine point of view (Allen/Jasmine).

Self-Reflection: The Woman Destroyed Blue Jasmine focuses on Jasmine, born Jeannette French. Jasmine is a selfcreated New York socialite whose life falls apart when her husband, Hal, is sent to prison for being involved in Ponzi schemes. After Hal takes his own life and Jasmine loses almost everything she owns, she goes west to San Francisco to stay with her adoptive sister, Ginger, in the hopes of starting a new life. Ginger lives with her two young boys in a ‘homely’ flat, which shows her modest social background in comparison with the luxurious lifestyle Jasmine is used to. What is most important, though, is the contrast between Jasmine’s fractured personality and her sister Ginger. Needless to say, she brings confusion and chaos to her sister’s life. Jasmine suffered a nervous breakdown and now depends on a cocktail of drinks and pills. In contemporary parlance, she would be described as a neurotic woman – a characteristic trait shared by Allen’s on-screen persona. Indeed, his own characters have repeatedly been described along the lines of ‘the zany neurotic’, as termed by Kathleen Carroll (1974: 22). Jasmine is also a compulsive talker and is regularly seen talking to herself about her past life. At a party, she meets Dwight, who works for the State Department and has ambitions to run for Congress. However, Dwight puts an end to their engagement upon hearing about who Jasmine really is: ‘a woman destroyed’ by self-deception. The woman in crisis is an old cliché, also used by playwrights and writers such as Tennessee Williams and Simone de Beauvoir, among others. The female character in Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is a common reference among film reviewers and scholars discussing Jasmine. Indeed, Blanche DuBois is also characterized by social and emotional decline: she is driven by anxiety, and her fantasy mixes with reality to the point of confusion. Moreover, critics such as Rex Reed and Tim Walker2 and scholars such as Verna Foster have already pointed out numerous times that the similarities between Blanche and Jasmine are fostered by the fact that Cate Blanchett 2 Rex Reed, ‘Woody is Back: Blue Jasmine Is a Triumphant Take on A Streetcar Named Desire’, Observer (2013): https://observer.com/2013/07/woody-is-back-blue-jasmine-is-a-triumphanttake-on-a-streetcar-named-desire/; Tim Walker, ‘Film Review: Blue Jasmine – Magnif icent and Monstrous Cate Blanchett Helps Woody Allen Blossom Again’, The Independent (2013): https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/film-review-blue-jasminemagnificent-and-monstrous-cate-blanchett-helps-woody-allen-blossom-again-8738885.html

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has played both characters. In 2009, Blanchett performed the role of Blanche DuBois in Liv Ullman’s production of the play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The fact that Blanchett could have been influenced by this theatrical role in her portrayal of Jasmine should certainly not be underestimated. The film places much emphasis on the relation of role-playing and women. Among the numerous scholars who mentioned or explored the parallels between Blue Jasmine and A Streetcar Named Desire, the names of Sander Lee, Nassim Winnie Balestrini and Arlene Diane Landau can be cited. Foster also devotes an article to the parallels between Blue Jasmine and A Streetcar Named Desire by focusing on the characters and the plot structure. Despite sharing a lot, she notices that ‘Allen’s thematic concerns are different from Williams’s’ (2015: 190). Money and the position of women are the main differences between Allen’s and Williams’ works, according to Foster. I would claim that this difference cannot be underestimated; several film reviewers have pointed out the significant place that the female character occupies in Allen’s film. Indeed, there is not a single scene in which Jasmine does not feature. The film’s main focus is hence on the female character’s inner state – as conveyed by the colour ‘blue’ associated with Jasmine, as in the title. Thus, if Allen has adapted and updated the character types and plot elements of Williams’ play or Elia Kazan’s film adaptation in 1951, I would argue that more powerful parallels can be drawn with de Beauvoir’s short story, ‘The Woman Destroyed’. Indeed, de Beauvoir’s and Allen’s works rely on their eponymous female characters who are broken or fractured. More particularly, I suggest that both works can be brought together via the multiple reflexive links evoked by their stylistic elements, such as the woman’s first-person point of view of the diary in de Beauvoir’s story and the flashbacks in Allen’s film. De Beauvoir’s ‘The Woman Destroyed’ was part of a series of stories that first appeared in the French women’s magazine Elle before being published in 1967 (by Gallimard) under the title The Woman Destroyed (La Femme rompue). The book includes a story also called ‘The Woman Destroyed’ focusing on Monique, the eponymous woman, who is destroyed by the revelation of her husband’s unfaithfulness. Now in her forties, Monique is married to her doctor husband, Maurice, with whom she has two daughters who are old enough to have a life of their own. In her first-person narrative, Monique shares her vision of a life of the ideal wife of an ideal husband who possesses nothing other than the past, but this has now collapsed behind her, as she writes in her diary. The themes of this short story attend to de Beauvoir’s concern with women’s situation and position in modern society, as with her seminal work, The Second Sex (1949), wherein she highlights the constraints

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imposed on women, relegating them to the domain of immanence characterized by determinism. Passivity, facticity and submission to biological fate defined immanence; in a word, it is an attitude informed by appearance and deception – a description fitting Jasmine’s rooted personality. De Beauvoir gives preference here to the form of fiction, as ‘The Woman Destroyed’ is a diary written by Monique, a woman focusing on her female existence and, hence, seen through her husband’s eyes: ‘Indeed I saw myself only through his eyes’ (de Beauvoir 2006 [1967]: 157). Hailed by Trevor Field (1989) as the most convincing diary novel, the narrative form does therefore draw attention to the significant function of the female self. According to the general definition, the diary is a first-person novel in which the narrator plays the role of protagonist too. As expected in a diary, Monique records her events: ‘I am overdoing the stimulants and the tranquilizers and […] I am racking myself to pieces’, ‘I gulp down spirits, tranquilizers or sleeping-pills’ (193). The emphasis on the present also marks Monique’s current situation: ‘I am nothing but a limp rag nowadays’ (203), ‘I am racked with anxiety’ (108), ‘I am too utterly destroyed’ (149), ‘Now I am a dead woman’ (219). At other times, the present contrasts with the past – ‘Maurice lied to me’ (112) – but in the following instance the use of the past tense expresses overlapping time: ‘It was so like the past’ (140). At times, the past brings to light her fatalistic or deterministic situation: ‘She too left off her studies when she married’ (119), ‘I gave up the idea of a career for myself’ (169). The interweaving of the past and the present (also emphasized with the use of the present perfect in English) highlights moments of self-reflection and her ‘awareness of life’: ‘I possess nothing other than my past’ (185), ‘I have lived only for him’ (115), ‘I have never made proper allowance for untruth’ (116), ‘I have had exactly the kind of life I wanted’ (117). The inner thoughts of a contemporary French woman, as pictured by de Beauvoir, are mired by fatalistic or deterministic feelings of living with her husband, both her female and male friends, and her children. As a matter of fact, Monique’s self-reflections reveal a negative portrait of women as in crisis or mad, neurotic, depressive or destroyed, according to some feminists (as noted by de Beauvoir and cited by Phil Powrie, 1992). These feminists, whom de Beauvoir mentions, also pointed out the main female protagonist’s difficulties in seeing beyond her own situation. Feminist remarks go along the lines that Monique is valued for her usefulness to her husband; she therefore identifies herself as an object. Moreover, de Beauvoir was criticized for showing a woman who merges her being with that of a man, seduced by the security a man’s proprietorship brings. Indeed, Monique’s narration brings to the fore her dependence on her husband and

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her renunciation of her freedom and her identity in her involvements with others: ‘When one has lived so much for others it is quite hard to turn oneself back again – to live for oneself’ (124). For Terry Keefe, the main theme of ‘The Woman Destroyed’ is ‘culpable self-deception’ (1976: 86). In this case, the diary’s strong romantic mode, as identified by Elizabeth Fallaize (1990), finds an explanation in the illusory but deceptive images of her relationship with Maurice that Monique draws and hangs on to. According to Keefe, two key behaviours define Monique’s self-delusion: her suppressing pieces of evidence that would enable her to see the situation, and making herself believe in the strength of her marriage. For in valorizing the heterosexual couple, as Monique does, the female self is repressed following gender and sexual norms. The woman abides by cultural and social expectations (words such as ‘appearances’ and ‘authenticity’ linked to the ‘picture they have of me’ [144] reinforce this idea), which she has internalized (in her self-delusion), limiting her own choices and freedom of action. However, it could also be argued that Monique’s self-delusive attitude serves to demystify the romance plot of ‘The Woman Destroyed’. It is clear that this short story, built as a diary, focuses on a female self-reflection of her existential plight of living solely for the others (husband and children). The first-person narrative of a female protagonist fosters links with de Beauvoir’s position as an author preoccupied by women’s condition and situation.3 Monique acts, therefore, as the personification of de Beauvoir’s ideas and feelings about the depersonalization of women living in a situation not of their own making. For de Beauvoir and Monique, the act of writing becomes an act of female self-reflection and self-creation. In this sense, I would argue that the narrator and the protagonist in the diary emphasize not an already defined relation but rather one that is shifting or in flux. They reflect the transitional position between immanence and transcendence or between object and subject, as suggested in de Beauvoir’s philosophy of existentialist reciprocity aiming to re-evaluate the notion of the self, determined by one’s difference from an other. It is in this sense that ‘The Woman Destroyed’ encourages change and transformation in women’s situation and position in society. The diary finishes on this idea: ‘The door to the future will open. Slowly. Unrelentingly. I am on the threshold.’ (220). This shifting position is also highlighted by scholars such as Fallaize, who has commented on Monique’s constantly changing perspectives and feelings in her diary entries. 3 De Beauvoir’s writing bears a strong personal element – as, for instance, in her autobiographical fictions such as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958).

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Allen’s f ilm centres on a woman’s self-delusion and self-deception underpinned by the idea of flux, as demonstrated by numerous flashback scenes. As such, the film foregrounds shifting perspectives as formulated by Jasmine or as emanating from her consciousness in flashbacks. Moreover, the film itself could have originated from diverse sources. Williams’ play is the most cited reference, but others have also been mentioned, including Kazan’s filmic adaptation of Williams’ play. Both Foster (2015) and Landau (2014) suggest a link with the rise and fall of the investment advisor Bernie Madoff and his wife Ruth. 4 To all these parallels, this chapter brings a new perspective by creating a link with de Beauvoir’s story, ‘The Woman Destroyed’. Put together, all these references bring to the fore Allen’s multiple perspectives, which are also part of his self-image. Allen’s personal view is shifting and thus difficult to grasp. As Andrew Gothard (2013) indicates, Allen is famous for holding contradictory views in interviews, submerging his work with ambivalence. The treatment of self-delusion and self-deception in the film could fall within this description too. As will be discussed below, in Jasmine’s case, self-delusion is related to ambivalence in her merging of reality and illusion, which is accentuated in her act of (self-)creation (with her change of name, for instance).

Self-Invention: Jasmine/Jeanette French Jasmine and de Beauvoir’s heroine, Monique, are mirror images of the broken woman whose destruction is read in the change in mental state affecting their behaviour. Both women are heavily reliant on drugs (Prozac, Lithium and Xanax) and alcohol (Stoli Martini for Jasmine). For Monique, this change is expressed psychologically in the feeling of falling low into the abyss of sadness or despair, which is rendered into letting herself go by not washing herself or no longer cleaning the house. Jasmine’s psychological and physical appearance also bears the marks of a change in her situation with the use of close-up shots of her manic face when, for instance, she tells her own story to her sister’s two young sons, mentioning her experiences of anxiety, claustrophobia, an acute fear of death as well as nightmares and a nervous breakdown. She is often depicted suffering from bouts of anxiety or 4 Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years of prison in 2009 for his involvement in Ponzi schemes. The rise and fall of Bernie Madoff and his wife have now been brought to the small screen. A two part mini-series made for US television called Madoff f irst appeared in February 2016.

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hysteria resulting in her gasping for air. The repetition of this type of scene insists on her frenzied physical condition related to Dwight’s proposing to her, for instance, or her boss, Dr. Flicker, the dentist, revealing his infatuation for her. All these scenes should be read in light of the final scene with her husband revealing the seriousness of his relationship with a young French au-pair, Lisette Boudreau. At this point in the film, as the narrative comes full circle and takes us back to where it started, the emphasis is placed on how one thing led to another for Jasmine, as she also tells the boys. The origin of Jasmine’s tantrums can be related to her husband’s change towards her or, more specifically, her own vision and reading of her husband’s behaviour. In this sense, her behaviour accords with that of Monique as, in both of their cases, their lives are turned upside down when they are made aware of their husband’s infidelities. These characters’ despair and personal disintegration emphasize their dependence on their husbands and, for Jasmine, on men in general. When she experiences an anxiety fit with Dwight, she tells him that ‘I wanted you to want me and now you do’. Following de Beauvoir’s heroine, these women’s lives are commanded by their husbands’ professional ventures and private affairs to the point of turning a blind eye to their own situations. Both women live in lies and self-deception or self-delusion, to borrow Keefe’s description of Monique in ‘The Woman Destroyed’. Monique and Jasmine both blind themselves to evidence of their husbands’ behaviour. Jasmine tells her socialite friends, ‘I never pay attention to Hal’s business affairs. I have no head for that sort of thing.’ This is a position corroborated by her sister, Ginger, who says about Jasmine, ‘What the hell did she know about f inance?’, which turns out to mean in Ginger’s words that ‘when Jasmine don’t wanna know something she’s got a habit of looking the other way.’ By contrast, in the key scene with her sister’s sons, Jasmine unveils herself by disclosing her awareness of her situation: ‘Of course, you know, I probably did suspect that not everything Hal did was always 100-percent above board. Christ, I mean, you’d have to be an idiot not to think his phenomenal success was too good to be true.’ Her knowledge of Hal’s corrupt business practices is confirmed by a final flashback showing Jasmine turning him in to the FBI. These two scenes are crucial in her being true to herself by exposing her mental condition. In a way, this scene brings to the fore the style of the film underpinned by Jasmine’s stream of consciousness. Indeed, as shown right from the beginning, Jasmine is seen ‘babbling about her life’ to a woman whom she is sat next to on the plane from New York to San Francisco. Jasmine’s monologues recur in the f ilm: when she arrives at

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Ginger’s flat, at the party she goes to with her sister, on the street, in the car with Dwight, and finally on the bench in the final scene. With these monologues, the emphasis, of course, is on Jasmine’s first-person accounts privileging her vision or point of view, which is, here, a re-enactment (in the present) of her past experiences with her husband Hal. However, Jasmine’s soliloquies on the streets are cruelly rendered by her sister’s son when he tells her: ‘then you talked to yourself’. These moments of talking to herself about past events mostly follow flashback scenes. She, in a way, carries on the conversation taking place in flashbacks even though it is not clear cinematographically that these scenes emanate from her perspective. The flashback scenes convey a more objective stance, despite the fact that they concern Jasmine and her memory of her past life. This subjective/objective position brings to mind the director/auteur’s presence in his film, which will be discussed later. In the meantime, it is worth noting that Jasmine’s monologues in its first-person singular accounts focus on the enunciator as a protagonist of the events recorded/voiced. Similar to Monique’s diary in ‘The Woman Destroyed’, the narration is fragmented in time, such as her conversation on the plane describing events not following any specific time order. The narrative fragmentation also reinforces her self-delusion with shots of romantic moments (especially at the beginning of the film) as well as her confusion. Moreover, her statements often contradict each other; on the plane she talks about her leaving university to marry Hal and laughing at the prospect of her becoming an anthropologist if she had graduated. This is dismissed a few scenes later when meeting her new sister’s boyfriend, she declares that she is thinking of going back to education, as her biggest mistake was to leave college and not complete her final year. These are contradictions emphasizing her confusion as a woman destroyed or ‘who got crazy’, as perceived by her sister’s young boys. On the other hand, these moments show her lucid side with instances of self-revelation instead of self-delusion. Following a flashback of Jasmine hosting a party, she is in her sister’s flat waiting for her and continuing the conversation by talking to herself about changing her name to Jasmine because ‘Jeanette had no panache’. As a variation of the diary form used by Monique in de Beauvoir’s ‘The Woman Destroyed’, Jasmine’s monologues function as reflections of and on her own self. The emphasis is therefore on Jasmine’s self-creation as ‘night-blooming Jasmine. Come to life after it gets dark’ – as she reveals her name’s origin to Dwight. This observation could be taken as highlighting the thin line that exists between self-delusion and self-revelation involved in the process of self-creation.

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Masculine Self-Projection in Blue Jasmine The early scene with Dwight is informative in its drawing attention to her role-playing when this time she re-invents herself and introduces herself as an interior designer5 who is the widow of a surgeon. Role-playing is central to the film’s narrative, given that Jeanette became Jasmine who married into wealth and lived on Park Avenue in New York. After having all her wealth confiscated by the government, she moves into her sister’s ‘homey’ flat in San Francisco. Even her language gives away the fact that she is playing a persona – with her sister and, most importantly, with her female friends from New York. As a result, the expression used recurrently by Augie and Chili to describe her is ‘phony’, which is also a term Jean-Paul Sartre used to refer to people who remain under the delusion of being someone, someone different. As aforementioned, this condition of self-delusion applies to Jasmine from the beginning to the end of the film, when Jasmine announces to her sister that she will marry Dwight and then move in with him. However, the last scene of a dishevelled Chanel-style Jasmine sitting on a bench and talking to herself depicts a broken woman, a woman destroyed. Jasmine remains, therefore, faithful to a static image of herself, one that is reflected back to her by men (Hal and Dwight). It can also be noticed that despite her dishevelled appearance, she lucidly explains to her sister the reasons for her and Dwight’s mutual attraction: ‘He’s one of these men who’s lost without a woman. It has to be the right woman, who’s a plus for his career. And I have the social skills required for his future in politics.’ Notwithstanding her conviction to put everything behind her and start a new life, Jasmine shows hardly any changes in her behaviour and condition, and in this sense she is more similar to her sister than she believes. Claiming repetitively that ‘Ginger and I are different people’, she justifies her view by explaining that ‘It’s not genetic. You can’t always blame everything on your genes. If you’re prepared to work hard and not settle.’ However, the film betrays a woman who settles for her condition and situation of the appropriate wife who has the social skills required for Dwight’s politics. Therefore, Jasmine sees herself as the right woman who can be a plus for Dwight’s career. Jasmine and Ginger are similar in their denial of their position as autonomous or authentic selves. Whilst Ginger advocates an essentialist view bathed in biological destiny, Jasmine believes in constructed 5 Undoubtedly a reference to Allen’s Interiors (1978) whose main female character is an interior designer. Her ambivalence is suggested in her spiritual crisis contrasted with her active and creative professional role.

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social roles following a (Beauvoirian) existentialist position. However different their paths are, their feminine condition is similar, as both deny their own freedom and also their own responsibility for their lives, choosing instead to define themselves as relative beings. They are both mired in what de Beauvoir and Sartre call their ‘bad faith’ or inauthentic lives. This existentialist view is reflected in their adoptive status, as not having the same biological parents but sharing the same fostered parents and, hence, a similar social female condition. Advocating an existentialist position in Blue Jasmine, Allen shows the breakdown of a woman’s false image as projected – or inflicted – on her by a dominant Western patriarchal society. Hence, the depiction of a broken woman betrays the presence of the (male) author’s intentions. Allen is known for his on-screen persona. Even if he is not playing in his own films, his presence can still be felt. Indeed, his presence/absence has often been conflated with the idea of the ‘Woody Allen character’, suggesting a presence even when Allen is not appearing in the movie, which is the case with Blue Jasmine. In the DVD press conference, Cate Blanchett pointed out that Allen could have played her character, Jasmine. However, rather than debating whether Allen’s films are autobiographical and looking for some of Allen’s characteristics projected onto the persona of Jasmine (as neurotic and artistic), I would prefer to accentuate his intentions as an auteur within his films. Indeed, as Allen has also continually denied this conflation of his personality with his characters, his films’ concern with the relations between I and other betrays an existentialist self-expression characterizing auteur cinema. John Douglas Macready (2013) has already pointed out the significance of existentialist themes in Allen’s films and their exploration through links to philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre. I would add to this list de Beauvoir. The reference to de Beauvoir certainly brings interesting new readings by emphasizing the gender perspective within an existential discourse underpinned by ambiguity. Whilst the emphasis is on male actors cast as Woody Allen (for instance, Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris [2011]) or Allen’s views linked to male philosophers, as aforementioned, Allen6 sharing de Beauvoir’s existentialist view on the condition of women moves the debate to the tensions between the I and the other, or between man and woman (Jasmine 6 In an interview with Ken Kelly in 1976, Allen shared his feminist opinions which could be aligned with those of de Beauvoir. He said: ‘Pretty much everything women are saying has made sense – they have been shabbily treated. There has got to be a change of the relations of the sexes.’ (quoted in Kapsis 2016: 35).

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and Hal/Dwight as well as Jasmine and Allen), resulting in the woman’s bad faith or refusal of freedom and responsibility (‘I brought everything on myself. I’ve only got myself to blame. I did it to myself again, as usual.’ – this last sentence underlines Jasmine not believing what she says) as translated in her self-delusion. It is not the first time that Allen is placed in close relation to a woman in his films, for his attention to female characters has already been at the centre of many of his films, mainly Annie Hall (1977), Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979), September (1987), Another Woman (1988), Alice (1990) and Husbands and Wives (1992). Despite Allen’s focus on female subjectivity in crisis in these films, Cynthia Lucia notes how difficult it is to place his work ‘in a coherent feminist framework’. This is because ‘[t]hese crises are rooted in ‘the assumed right of patriarchal authority to confer social and sexual identity’’ (2013: 231). As mentioned above, de Beauvoir experienced the same kind of criticism from late-1960s feminists who condemned The Woman Destroyed for its obstinate portrayal of a broken woman. However, scholars such as Toril Moi (1990) have pointed out de Beauvoir’s intentions of exposing the plight of a woman in diary form. As such, a doubling effect is created between Monique as the subject of de Beauvoir’s writing and Monique as the writer of her diary. Moi notes that ‘Monique is at once a double of Beauvoir – another writing subject – and simply an effect of her discourse’ (ibid.: 63). This is also how the character of Jasmine can be understood with her monologues (her excessive talking to herself) representing the diarist’s metaphoric conversation. In this sense, this doubling effect in diary novel is also present in Allen’s cinema, focusing here on a woman’s inner traumatic experiences. Whilst the film is informed by Jasmine’s recurrent monologues, flashback scenes also depict Jasmine’s fall into despair. Whilst in the monologues the emphasis is on the first-person enunciator, in the flashback scenes the focus is on the subject of the monologues, that is, Jasmine’s broken self. The film’s stylistic form informed by flashbacks and hence fragmented narration reinforces the process of fragmentation of Jasmine’s identity, shifting between the I and the other. In other words, the film’s formal device foregrounds Jasmine’s split personality. Furthermore, Foster observes that one of the aims of the flashbacks is to contrast them with events in the present. However, I would add that the cinematic smooth transition between present and past scenes accentuates a dissolution of the boundaries between self and the other. This fluidity in editing is echoed in Jasmine’s personality, which easily shifts between moments of composure and moments of frenzy as well as times of self-delusion and times of self-awareness. As such, Allen emphasizes his omni-presence

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in exposing the complexity and contradictions informed by the shifting position of a (female) self in twenty-first-century Western society dominated at once by philanthropic and materialistic inclinations. Allen thus returns to the cliched image of the broken woman and highlights his auteurist position by unveiling this image through narrative and formal fragmentation. The image of the rooted broken woman serves to illustrate his condemnation of this dominant (patriarchal and consumerist) society, as de Beauvoir had done before him in the late 1960s. In this sense, Allen remains faithful to his auteurist position about the shifting personality of wo-men in contemporary Western society informed by French existentialism. As such, the full circle of the film’s structure reinforces the reflexive positions of the character and the auteur/director concerning their personal identities torn between authenticity and inauthenticity.

Conclusion From this study’s point of view, it can be inferred that the idea of Frenchness (through the presence of de Beauvoir’s existentialist position) in interpreting the persona of Jasmine is not to be discarded; her surname (French) bears the mark of this identity, too. For the idea of Frenchness in Allen’s cinema is constant and consistent with his previous films, such as the recent Midnight in Paris (2011) and the earlier Annie Hall (1977), where the main characters exchange existentialist reading. Recent volumes on Allen’s cinema include an article about the influence France has had on his work, including Gilles Menegaldo’s ‘Woody Allen and France’ (2013). This is also underlined by Martin Hall’s recent publication title ‘“Thank God the French Exist”: Exploring the Referentiality of the Formal Elements of Film in Deconstructing Harry’ (2015), which is a study emphasizing the significance of the auteur in Allen’s cinema. In a way, the adoption of a French perspective in Blue Jasmine reinforces the omnipresence of the expressive self of Allen as an auteur. Auteur cinema is characterized by self-reference, self-representation and a sustaining personal position, which is described by Linda Haverty Rugg as a ‘directorial self-projection’ (2014: 2). Hence, authorship is linked to the question of the self as omnipresent as it is projected on the screen, such as in Allen’s films. In Blue Jasmine, Allen’s preoccupation with the self is projected onto Jasmine as a broken woman. The image of the broken woman brings to the fore the split personality of the female who is self-informed by authorial self-projection, described by Rugg as ‘the ascription of one’s own traits,

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feelings, ideas, and beliefs onto others’ (2014: 11) – the ‘others’ in Allen’s case being the actresses. In Allen’s film, Jasmine seems to adhere to this auteurist idea of performing selfhood when, in an attempt to justify to Ginger her lying to Dwight, she shouts: Look, could you stop saying I was lying? God. Okay, I may have dressed up a few facts, omitted a few unpleasant details, but in the main, I mean, my feelings, my ideas, my humor. I mean, isn’t that who I am? People reinvent themselves, don’t they?

Authorial projection is here linked with the idea of transference or merging of selves towards the creation of selfhood. Therefore, what is highlighted is the instability of the self in relation to the others. The French au pair Lisette holds the position of the other for Jasmine in the sense that she triggers changes or a reinvention in Jasmine. At the end of the day, Lisette stands for inf idelities in human relationships, which for a person like Jasmine is equated to an instability of her ‘phony’ personality. Inf idelity in the French au pair character brings out Jasmine’s persona based on inauthenticity too. The whole f ilm, though, focuses on the instability of the character of Jasmine through her re-invention, depicting a persona in transit and thus complicating the cliched image of a self-delusional woman.

Bibliography Balestrini, Nassim Winnie. (2015). Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine: A Seductively Scented Flower Performing in a Theatrical Bubble. In Klara Stephanie Szlezak and D.E. Wynter (Eds.), Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 31–47. Beauvoir, Simone de. (1949). The Second Sex. Paris: Gallimard. —. (1958). Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Paris: Gallimard. —. (1967). The Woman Destroyed. Paris: Gallimard. Carroll, Tim. (1993). Woody and His Women. London: Little, Brown. Carroll, Kathleen. (2016). Woody Allen Says Comedy Is No Laughing Matter. In Robert E. Kapsis (Ed.), Woody Allen. Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 3–6. Detmer, David. (2013). The Philosopher as Filmmaker. In Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus (Eds.), A Companion to Woody Allen. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 460–480.

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Fallaize, Elizabeth. (1990). Resisting Romance: Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed and the Romance Script. In Margaret Atack and Phil Powrie (Eds.), Contemporary French Fiction by Women: Feminist Perspectives. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, pp. 15–25. Field, Trevor. (1989). Form and Function in the Diary Novel. London: McMillan Press. Foster, Verna A. (2015). White Woods and Blue Jasmine: Woody Allen Rewrites A Streetcar Named Desire. Literature/Film Quarterly, 43:3, 188–201. Gorden, Jill. (2004). Self-Knowledge in Another Woman. In Mark T. Conrad and Aeon J. Skoble (Eds.), Woody Allen and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, pp. 218–242. Gothard, Andrew. (2013). ‘Who’s He When He’s at Home?’ A Census of Woody Allen’s Literacy, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions. In Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus (Eds.), A Companion to Woody Allen. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 381–402. Hall, Martin. (2015). ‘Thank God the French Exist’: Exploring the Referentiality of the Formal Elements of Film in Deconstructing Harry. In Klara Stephanie Szlezak and D.E. Wynter (Eds.), Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 51–67. Havert, Rugg Linda. (2014). Self-Projection. The Director’s Image in Art Cinema. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Kapsis, Robert E., (2016). Woody Allen. Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Ingle, Zachary. (2013). ‘A Full Meal with a Vitamin Pill and Extra Wheatgerm’: Woody Allen, Dostoevsky, and Existential Morality. In Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus (Eds.), A Companion to Woody Allen. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 119–136. Keefe, Terry. (1976). ‘Simone de Beauvoir’s La Femme rompue: Studies in SelfDeception’, Essays in French Literature, 13, 77–97. Landau, Arlene Diane. (2014). A Review of Blue Jasmine (2013). Psychological Perspectives, 57:3, 344–48. Lee, Sander. (2015). Blue Jasmine, A Streetcar Named Desire, and the Power of SelfDeception. Film and Philosophy, 19, 96–114. Lucia, Cynthia. (2013). ‘Here… It’s Not Their Cup of Tea.’ Woody Allen’s Melodramatic Tendencies in Interiors, September, Another Woman, and Alice. In Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus (Eds.), A Companion to Woody Allen. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 229–256. Macready, John Douglas. (2013). A Difficult Redemption. Facing the Other in Woody Allen’s Exilic Period. In Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus (Eds.), A Companion to Woody Allen. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 95–115. Menegaldo, Gilles. (2013). Woody Allen and France. In Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus (Eds.), A Companion to Woody Allen. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 53–72.

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Moi, Toril. (1990). Intentions and Effect: Rhetoric and Identification in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed. In Toril Moi (Ed.), Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, pp. 61–93. Powrie, Phil. (1992). Rereading Between the Lines: A Postscript on La Femme rompue. The Modern Language Review, 87:2, 320–329. Rapf, Joanna. (2013). ‘It’s Complicated, Really’. Women in the Films of Woody Allen. In Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus (Eds.), A Companion to Woody Allen. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 257–276. Williams, Tennesse. (1947). A Streetcar Named Desire, New York: New American Library.

Filmography A Streetcar Named Desire. DVD. Directed by Elia Kazan. USA: Warner Bros. 1951 Alice. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Orion Pictures. 1990 Annie Hall. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1977 Another Woman. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Orion Pictures. 1988 Blue Jasmine. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Sony Pictures Classics. 2013 Husbands and Wives. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Tristar Pictures. 1992 Interiors. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1978 Manhattan. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1979 Midnight in Paris. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Sony Pictures Classics. 2011 September. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Orion Pictures. 1987

About the Author Sophie T. Bélot is a Senior Lecturer in Film at St Mary’s University, London. Her research interest focuses on contemporary French and Francophone cinema (mainly Algerian cinema). She is particularly interested in the object-subject dialectic in relation to images of women and their bodies. She has published widely on this topic in the context of the Algerian War of Independence and the civil war as well as within auteur cinema. Her main approaches are interdisciplinary with an emphasis on philosophy. She is currently working on a monograph on the influence of cinema on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy (phenomenology) for Bloomsbury’s Film Thinks Series.

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‘New York Was His Town, and It Always Would Be…’ Narrative Storytelling and the Vexing Role of Women in Manhattan John D. Ayres

Abstract This chapter considers the manner in which Woody Allen has employed storytelling devices in his work and what effect these strategies have on the representation of women in his cinema. Given the special commercial and critical significance that Manhattan (1979) has within his oeuvre, it is this film that will provide the central focus of the chapter. Issues relating to Allen’s use of voiceover narration, gendered agency/passivity and character binarism will be considered in terms of how they impact upon the representation and function of Manhattan’s primary female characters. The work will close by considering how Broadway Danny Rose (1984) might be seen as an unofficial sequel of sorts to the aforementioned 1979 film, via its sympathetic rewriting of the narrative conclusion. Keywords: narrative, author, voiceover

In 2017, 38 years after its original theatrical run, Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) was re-released as a new 4K digital print in cinemas across the United Kingdom and in select cities in the United States. That this was the only film of Allen’s to be accorded the honour of a reissue after 4K restoration suggested, even at the time, something of the special status that Manhattan holds within his extensive oeuvre. Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris famously stated at its time of release that Allen’s motion picture was ‘the only great film of the Seventies’ (quoted in McCann 1990: 9). Asked in the 1990s if his contentious view still remained,

Hall, Martin R. (ed.), Women in the Work of Woody Allen. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463722926_ch02

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Sarris clarified that ‘[t]here are others I like from that period. But my test of a movie is whether or not I can look at it again and again. Can you stand to see The Bridge on the River Kwai another ten times? Or Lawrence of Arabia?’ (quoted in Meade 2000: 130). Manhattan is still Allen’s most successful box off ice hit (adjusted for inflation) and arguably the project that is most emblematic of his desire to bridge the divide between comedy – his natural and longstanding metier – and straight drama. Indeed, Allen was to highlight this himself when discussing Manhattan in conjunction with its two immediate predecessors, Oscar-winning critical breakthrough Annie Hall (1977) and the unpopular familial drama Interiors (1978). As he has noted, ‘I’ve integrated things more […]. It’s like a mixture of what I was trying to do with Annie Hall and Interiors’ (quoted in Brode 1991: 176). The f ilm’s continued cultural cache may also be tied to its parallels with Allen’s own private life where, much like his character Isaac Davis, he engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with a woman that was decades his junior, though unlike Isaac this was to controversially be the adopted daughter of his long-time partner, Mia Farrow. Allen somewhat ruefully references this in his recently published autobiography, in which he comments that ‘[w]hen I fell in love with Soon-Yi, Manhattan was revived and I suddenly got a reputation as someone obsessed with young women.’ (2020: 196). This was not, of course, the first such relationship Allen had experienced, having dated high school student Stacey Nelkin during the production of Annie Hall. Nelkin was later credited as the inspiration for Tracy, the much younger love interest of Isaac in Manhattan (Meade 2000). This is something that Allen himself has corroborated (2020: 195–6). At the time, Allen was aged 41, whilst Nelkin was only 17 years old. An almost identical claim has also been made by actress and model Christina Engelhardt in the controversial HBO documentary series Allen v. Farrow (Dick and Ziering 2021). During the second episode, she asserts that a romantic relationship with the director began when she turned 17 years old, as well as her belief that she also provided inspiration for Tracy. It is noteworthy that Allen refused to cooperate with the production of this series. Recently resurfaced child abuse allegations regarding Allen’s adopted daughter Dylan and a greater consciousness of issues surrounding gendered power structures in society have prompted a critical reassessment of his output in some quarters, and Manhattan in particular. This is succinctly encapsulated by Steven Kurutz, who wrote in 2018 in The New York Times that ‘Manhattan practically seems pre-engineered to provoke debate in the post-Weinstein world’. Given the ongoing centrality of the film to debates surrounding Allen’s private and professional treatment and representations

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of the opposite sex, it is undoubtedly an ideal text for the analysis of women in his work. More specifically, analyzing narrative elements of Allen’s film allows for an understanding of how he uses women as a device for constructing his fictional worlds. The importance of this is highlighted by Graeme Turner in his assertion that ‘[…] narrative can be described as a means of “making sense” of our social world, and sharing that sense with others. Its universality underlines its intrinsic place in human communication.’ (1993: 68). Manhattan is the first of Allen’s films to adopt a full-throated novelistic approach to storytelling, an instinct that reached its apotheosis with his narratively rich and multi-stranded motion pictures Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). The reasons for this have been little discussed in scholarship addressing Manhattan. It may well have been the case that after the emphasis placed on the autobiographical aspects of Annie Hall by both critics and audiences and following his experience of adopting a more recognizably novelistic structure for Interiors, the film Manhattan presented an opportunity to use the latter to offset his signature focus on fictionalized surrogates of himself, particularly as he was to appear in the film as protagonist Isaac Davis. This chapter intends to examine the functions of the three primary female characters in his 1979 film with three classic narrative storytelling devices at the forefront of consideration, namely voiceover narration, gendered agency/passivity and character binarism. The first section will consider the disparity in power between male and female narrators in Manhattan, particular in terms of how key characters are able – or unable – to vocalize their own self-analysis for the audience. This will focus in particular on Isaac’s opening monologue and the conveyance of his ex-wife Jill’s (Meryl Streep) memoir of their married life entitled Marriage, Divorce and Selfhood. The second section will consider what scope exists for both Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) and Mary (Diane Keaton), Isaac’s subsequent lover, to exercise narrative agency within the story, and the extent to which they do. The third section will use narratologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of binary oppositions, a set of criteria by which meaning in a narrative can be divided into two sets of agents (De George and De George 1972: xix). The complexity of Allen’s use of these agents, by which he emphasizes oppositions within genders just as much as those between them, will be explored in conjunction with the love quadrangle that powers the majority of the narrative action. The final section will consider the various ways in which Allen’s 1984 f ilm Broadway Danny Rose might be viewed as an unoff icial sequel of

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sorts to Manhattan, one within which at least some of the ‘wrongs’ done to his surrogate character in the earlier film are rewritten to achieve a more favourable and sympathetic outcome for the central protagonist.

‘Chapter One’: Narration and the Legitimization of Perspective As in Annie Hall, the film Manhattan opens with a monologue performed by Woody Allen. Where that earlier film saw Allen delivering a direct-tocamera address setting up the major thematic concerns of the forthcoming story (including the lead protagonist’s neuroses and his relationship with the eponymous love interest), the introduction to his 1979 film constitutes a voiceover combined with George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ on the soundtrack and shots of varying length presenting imagery of New York City and its inhabitants, culminating in a firework display over Central Park. Though both narrations are signif icantly different in terms of both content and presentation, Graham McCann identifies a crucial commonality that says much about how Allen uses narration as a means of imposing a male perspective on his storytelling. As he says: In Annie Hall, Allen begins by looking straight at the camera and thereby establishes himself as the master of ceremonies […]. Manhattan opens with another variant of the controlling monologue as Allen’s voice-over recites different versions of the first paragraph of his character’s workin-progress about the city. (1990: 31)

McCann’s adoption of the term ‘controlling monologue’ is significant, not only insofar as it accurately describes the function of both narrations in the aforementioned films but also in its echoing of Foster Hirsch’s own analysis of Allen’s films, in which he suggests that a guiding voice within the narratives helps Allen to ‘suture his narrative fragments’ and ‘assert his control’ over both movie and audience (1981: 224). Whilst in this instance Allen’s speaker doesn’t remain invisible beyond the introductory narration, the emphasis both writers place on this storytelling device being deployed for the purposes of ‘control’ speaks to the imposition of an unequivocally and unashamedly male storytelling perspective on a narrative that contains three key female characters. In doing this, Allen can be seen to reinforce an observation made by Marilyn Johns Blackwell, who stated that the use of voiceovers/narration in film is as much a means of oppressing female characters as the privileging of

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men in the frame (1997). This male privileging is further reinforced by the monologue’s aggressive closing references to Isaac’s sexual prowess, that of a ‘jungle cat’, and his ownership of the city, which was ‘his city, and it always would be’. In considering the possibility that the film’s story could be based either on the events that inspired the novel that Isaac begins writing at the narrative’s conclusion, or indeed the completed novel itself, Michael Smith challenges the extent to which an audience can place its trust in the opening narration by describing our central protagonist as an ‘unreliable narrator par excellence’ (2016: 338). Smith makes further reference to the tell-all memoir that Isaac’s ex-wife Jill has written and that is awaiting publication at the beginning of the film’s narrative. It is the handling of this narrative detail that is more informative of Allen’s approach to narration – and the capacity, or lack thereof, for women to articulate their own storytelling perspective – than any other aspect of Manhattan. Though Jill is present in two key scenes during the motion picture, the conveyance of her view of Isaac and their ill-fated union is conspicuously achieved by means other than her own articulation. Interestingly, it is not Isaac who carries out this narrative function but instead his friend Yale (Michael Murphy) and Yale’s wife Emily (Anne Byrne). On a day excursion to the waterfront, Yale, Emily, Isaac and Mary – the latter at this juncture occupying the role of Isaac’s love interest – pass a storefront displaying Jill’s revealing tome. The next shot, which reveals a largely deserted wharf, is static, with Yale’s voice heard off-camera as the foursome enter frame right, quoting the book as saying, ‘Jesus, listen to this: Making love to this deeper, more masterful female made me realize what an empty experience, what a bizarre charade, sex with my husband was.’ The next portion of dialogue – in which Isaac expresses feelings of nausea, admits to a threesome with Jill and another woman, and defends himself against the allegation that he deliberately attempted to run over Jill’s lesbian lover Connie (Karen Ludwig) in retribution – is delivered with all four characters in shot. Mary, Emily and Yale then leave the frame to the left, leaving the camera to linger on Isaac’s increasingly despairing expression as Emily orates off-screen, with some evident enjoyment, another portion of Jill’s book: He was given to fits of rage, Jewish liberal paranoia, male chauvinism, self-righteous misanthropy and nihilistic moods of despair. He had complaints about life but never any solutions. He longed to be an artist but baulked at the necessary sacrifices. In his most private moments, he

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spoke of his fear of death, which he elevated to tragic heights, when in fact it was mere narcissism.

The fact that Jill’s devasting critique of Isaac is delivered by other characters robs her of the control of expression and tone that is inherent in self-oratory, with the barely contained delight of Yale and Emily in their ability to embarrass Isaac undercutting somewhat the seriousness of her recollections. That both Yale and Emily orate some of Jill’s analysis off-screen provides a further visual diminishment of the details of her account, with the lingering medium shot on Isaac serving to emphasize more the comic effect of seeing Allen’s increasingly crestfallen reaction. Yet the employment of Yale and Emily as adequate conduits for fairmindedly communicating Jill’s observations of Isaac had already been fatally undermined by the first scene following Isaac’s opening monologue, where Isaac, Tracy, Emily and Yale are having drinks. After Tracy excuses herself, Isaac informs Emily and Yale that Jill is writing a book about their marriage, to which Emily responds ‘That’s really tacky’ and Yale reassures him that ‘[i]t’s just gossip, you know. Gossip is the new pornography. Look at the daily newspapers.’ As such, both characters have tried to delegitimize Jill’s own remembrances of her relationship with Isaac, with Yale effectively likening her writing to the worst kind of gutter press. For all of their later schadenfreude towards Isaac over the publication of the book, the fact that it is these two characters who are deployed to convey its contents, having earlier dismissed its sense of decency and decorum, does much to deflect from its critique of Isaac. As Terry Allison and Renée Curry (1996) have noted, whilst the admission of a homosexual union being more fulfilling than her marriage to Isaac might initially be seen as an attack on the idea of heterosexual male patriarchy, the mocking mediation of Jill’s words undermines this possibility for an unencumbered expression of female perspective. Indeed, one reading of this would assert that in not allowing Jill to self-articulate her own experiences, she is further ‘othered’ in a film narrative where she is one of only two openly homosexual characters, with this particular demographic being largely underrepresented in Allen’s work given its predominantly liberal urban setting (Lawton 2018). With this in mind, the uninterrupted nature of Isaac’s opening monologue, in which he is generously afforded several opportunities to ‘start this over’, dynamically illustrates the very different manner in which Allen lends the authorial mechanism of narration to characters both male and female. This is perhaps especially the case when used in conjunction with his own

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on-screen surrogate, who in the case of Manhattan might be seen as Allen’s ultimate ‘controlling’ narrator.

‘To him, New York meant beautiful women and street-smart guys…’: Gendered Agency and the Politics of Relationships Laura Mulvey’s seminal 1975 Screen article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ has been a highly influential text in deconstructing codes, both narrative and visual, that structure the manner in which men and women are represented, and interact, on film. Indeed, as Richard McCormick has noted, the work brought ‘sexual difference into theoretical discussion in a way that could not be ignored’ (1992: 174). It is not my intention here to provide a summary of the myriad ideas Mulvey developed but to draw attention to a single key notion that I will then extrapolate for analysis in conjunction with Manhattan. David Rodowick identifies Mulvey’s foregrounding of the male protagonist as an active presence in film compared to the passivity of females as one of the most important observations contained within her writing (1991). This was applied by Mulvey to the specific issue of the ‘gaze’ or ‘look’ employed by male viewers, characters and the camera but also the larger context of what function female characters play in film (Penley 1989). It is this latter factor that will be at the forefront of consideration here, as it presents a useful prism through which to develop an understanding of how Allen deploys female characters in Manhattan, and to what ends. There is a significant body of evidence showing that Allen, as a screenwriter, has frequently placed women in the kind of active male/passive female template that Mulvey identified, and arguably the most complex example of this can be found in Manhattan. The narrative opens with 42-year-old Isaac in a relationship with 17-year-old Tracy, with the age gap leading, perhaps inevitably, to a kind of teacher/student relationship reminiscent of George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion, with this being a dynamic also evident in other Allen films such as Annie Hall as observed by Ryan and Kellner (1988) and Hannah and Her Sisters as read by Kael (1996). This is reinforced by Isaac’s infantilizing put-downs of Tracy throughout most of the film, stifling the expression of her developing opinions with comments such as ‘You’re a kid, you don’t know what love means’ and ‘Hey, don’t be so precocious, okay? I mean don’t be so smart.’ Smith has written convincingly on the nature of Isaac’s relationship with Tracy in terms of the implications of their age gap, whether it legally constitutes statutory rape, and what this union – alongside those with Mary

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and Jill – tell us about Isaac’s narcissism (2016: 334–338). In doing so, Smith focuses on a key exchange between Isaac and Mary, one that is informative of how Allen handles the thorny topic of self-criticism in the film. During an evening stroll, Mary and Isaac engage in a conversation that culminates in her suggestion that the sexual humiliation of his first wife leaving him for another woman has resulted in Isaac seeking out a relationship with a young girl whose age means that she presents ‘no possible threat at all’. This possible exploitation of Tracy by Isaac, who eventually leaves her for Mary, validates Andreas Philaretou’s analysis of how Allen uses patriarchal arrangements in his films. He observes that in these movies, women are used as ‘exchangeable sexual commodities for the purpose of proving males’ masculine worth and male-male superiority’ (2006: 136). Mary’s direct confrontation of this element of Isaac’s relationship could be construed as Allen lending women a voice to articulate a critique of the dominant patriarchy, as embodied by his character. However, that Mary is the articulator raises some problems of its own from a Mulvian perspective. Mary initially seems to represent an authentic intellectual challenge to Isaac, who responds by initially adopting similar neutralizing tactics as those he uses with Tracy, berating her as a ‘yoyo’ who spouts ‘pseudo-intellectual garbage’. Whilst Isaac’s attacks speak just as much to the narcissism identified by Smith (2016), there is certainly a sense that Mary is ‘hiding her insecurity behind an intellectual pushiness’ (McCann 1990: 119), and indeed the very intellect that might potentially mark her out as a legitimate equal to Isaac and Yale (who is himself a teacher archetype in his role as a college professor) is the very thing that undermines her challenge to patriarchal structures within the story. In a paralleling of Isaac’s Pygmalionesque relationship with Tracy, Mary is remarkably open in admitting that her adult psychology has been largely moulded by an intellectually controlling man, her often-lionized ex-husband Jeremiah (Wallace Shawn). “[He] really opened me up sexually, taught me everything”, “Women found him devastating” and “I was tired of submerging my identity to a very brilliant, dominating man … He’s a genius” are just some of the statements that Mary makes in relation to her former paramour, and such is the forcefulness of his dynamic charisma during a chance encounter with Mary and Isaac that the latter temporarily and unobtrusively exits frame right, affording Jeremiah optimum visual presence. Mary’s disclosure of a Svengali-like association with Jeremiah, who even post-divorce appears to generate much wistful admiration from his ex-wife, casts a pall over what might be evaluated as a sharply critical female critique of Isaac’s liaison with Tracy. This reading of Mary’s views is supported by Sander H. Lee, who

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asserts that her ‘pseudo intellectual mumbo-jumbo’ has been drawn from the very thought processes that Jeremiah helped to instil in her years earlier, not necessarily from any individual spark of analytical brilliance (2002: 65). Interestingly, and particularly given the dismissive nature of Isaac and Mary’s attitude to the much younger Tracy, it is in fact Tracy who ultimately embodies a narrative agency far more potent than anything we see from Isaac himself. Her decision to continue with her acting studies in London, despite Isaac’s belated plea for her to remain in New York, demonstrates a clarity of purpose that is absent from Mary, who has shuttled back and forth in her affections between Yale and Isaac throughout the film. It also stands in stark contrast to Isaac, who himself has gone back and forth in his romantic resolve between Tracy and Mary, and Yale, who does the same between his wife Emily and Mary. Whilst Tracy does suggest their possible reunion after her stint abroad is completed, the implications of her rejection of Isaac’s plea to stay are complicated, with a cynical view attributing her resolve as having been spurred on by Isaac’s earlier rejection rather than unclouded individual steadfastness. This complexity is manifested not only in terms of the extent to which it asserts her narrative agency but also in terms of its evaluative positioning of Isaac at the close of the story, a factor that will be developed for further analytical consideration.

‘This was still a town that existed in black and white…’: Binarism both Within and Between Narratologist Claude Lévi-Strauss first put forth the idea of binary opposites as a means of analyzing mythological narratives (1972) and tales from North and South American tribal cultures (Thompson 2007). As Graeme Turner elaborates: One of the ways in which humans understand the world is through dividing it into sets of mutually-exclusive categories – land and sea, man and woman [emphasis added], good and bad, us and them […]. This binary pattern is logically supported by the fact that we define things not only in terms of what they are, but also in terms of what they are not. (1993: 72–73)

Some feminist film theory came to use Lévi-Strauss’s ideas as a means of explaining structures affecting human behaviour (Rotenstreich 1972), limits placed on females (Butler 1999), and how they could be enforced within a ‘hegemonic cultural discourse’ that placed the male as the idealized cultural

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subject in narratives (Blackwell 1997: 9). It is within this latter, more modern context that the idea of binarism will be considered here. As a structuring device for his narratives, Woody Allen has employed binary opposites in his films as a way of making meaning and conveying themes in a straightforward manner. Yet Allen can also be seen to have subverted Lévi-Strauss’s emphasis on gender difference, something in keeping with the consistency with which his work addresses the complexities of the human condition. Indeed, whilst some of his films are captured in black and white, their characters are resolutely not. In Manhattan in particular, the pre-eminence is attached to a perspective that highlights binary elements within genders as opposed to just between them, and in female terms they are embodied in Jill, Tracy and Mary. Much as the narration of Jill’s book serves to effectively separate her from the narrative’s central quartet, she is particularly distanced as a character – and within the narrative – from the film’s two other primary female characters. As well as being the story’s sexual ‘other’, Jill never shares the screen with either Tracy or Mary and is separated from them further by her level-headedness and clarity of thought. Unlike Isaac’s dual love interests, Jill hasn’t been thrown into emotional disarray due to feelings for him and in fact might be seen to have inflicted the kind of psychic unrest upon our lead protagonist that he has elsewhere to the tale’s other leading women. This is compounded by her open dismissiveness and hostility to Isaac, a character who largely seeks, and receives for the most part, the validation of those around him. The straightforwardness of Jill’s emotional life, as opposed to the hither and thither caused by Isaac in the feelings of Mary and Tracy, is made concrete by her acerbic memoir. Whereas Mary is torn between Isaac and Yale, and Tracy is torn at the narrative’s conclusion (albeit briefly) between Isaac and her acting ambitions in London, Jill is settled with her girlfriend Connie and clearly devoted to her son by Isaac, Willie (Damion Scheller). Motherhood is, in the end, just one more of the oppositions set up between Jill and both Mary and Tracy. Such is the extent to which Mary and Tracy are separated from Jill that it would be tempting to assume that the binarism between the former two is either non-existent or greatly diminished. Yet in several ways the two women are distanced from each other in character and circumstance. Tracy is a grounded 17-year-old who loves only Isaac. Her enthusiasm for life is natural, and she is content to learn about art, movies and other cultural pursuits from him. This contrasts markedly with Mary, a well-heeled thirty-something woman whose demeanour is described even by her lover Yale as ‘highly

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strung’. She has undoubtedly been jaded by romantic entanglements and believes she is at least Isaac’s intellectual equal if not his superior. By contrasting in particular the commitment these two women feel towards Isaac (as well as their age and general worldliness), Allen presents the choice that Isaac makes to leave Tracy for Mary as all the more bemusing, and as a result, his belated attempt to win her back at the film’s conclusion is all the more poignant. The one aspect of Tracy and Mary (and indeed Jill) that is in partial tandem as opposed to so many other features that appear binary in nature – namely their rejection of Isaac (with Mary’s being permanent and Tracy’s being inconclusive, short of further developments beyond the scope of the narrative) – sets up Allen’s surrogate as a tragic romantic hero of sorts. In doing so, Allen in his role as story author has been able to favourably mould his narrative and the function that leading female characters play in it as a means of elevating the emotional suffering of his surrogate to the level of selfless nobility. In a sense, this is the culmination of broader thematic assertions in the film revolving around the courage of those who approach art in a ‘genuine’ manner, and those for whom the act is disingenuous, or as Pablo Echart defines it, those with a ‘romantic and passionate worldview’ and other ‘small-minded people’ who are conditioned by ‘limited ambitions’ (2017: 59–60). Indeed, this dichotomy of values, by which there is a lively interplay between binarism and what might be termed ‘parallelism’, is explored in Manhattan via an extension of this to the central male characters. At the surface level, Isaac exists in something akin to a binary with his best friend and love rival, Yale. As the male components of the film’s central love quadrangle, both men represent a number of counterpoints to the other, with Isaac being frequently frantic, twice-divorced, voluntarily unemployed, in an ongoing continuum of unstable relationships and eventually inspired by his experiences to make progress with his novel. In contrast, Yale is more relaxed, expresses no dissatisfaction with his professorial duties, lacking in the dedication required to complete his own book on playwright Eugene O’Neill and whose developing marital instability with wife Emily only exists because he has made it so. Yet the concept of male binarism is greatly complicated, perhaps even more so than that of the female characters, by the overarching parallels between Isaac and Yale. Despite differing levels of commitment to their respective novels, both men are nevertheless writers. Their shared interest in Mary, and the descent in the decorum of their behaviour that results from it as the narrative develops, is another strong bond. It can even be argued that they represent a similar kind of cerebral and cultured masculinity that

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Mary is drawn to, making her own decision to choose between the two men a not uncomplicated matter. This myriad of complexities and interplay between similarities and differences in Isaac and Yale is perfectly encapsulated in Smith’s analysis of the film. In his discussion of the ethical dimensions of the characters, he pays particular attention to the confrontation scene between Isaac and Yale, in which the former accuses the latter of convenient rationalization of his behaviour in reigniting his relationship with Mary and a lack of personal integrity. Arguably the film’s most emotionally frenetic scene, it appears to frame a divide between the two men in their personal behaviour. Yet Smith correctly points out that in rejecting the younger woman, ‘the wrong that Isaac does to Tracy is therefore much the same as the wrong that Yale does to Isaac’ (2016: 329). In essence, whilst the framing of the scene places its emphasis on binarism between the two men, the actual thematic content does the opposite by drawing attention to the similarities in behaviour that have dictated this strand of the film’s narrative. It is arguable that even within the character of Isaac himself there resides a binarism, exemplified perhaps most explicitly via the film’s opening monologue in which he states, reformulates and restates again the perspective that the central protagonist in his yet-to-be-written novel has on his hometown of New York City. The push and pull between his love for and despairing critique of the pulsating metropolis is only brought to an end by Isaac’s adoption of the kind of narration that might be more commonly found in detective pulp fiction of the early twentieth century. Even this represents a binarism of sorts, with the hesitant, neurotic masculinity embodied by Isaac standing in stark contrast to the unflinching, unsentimental assertiveness of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. Ultimately, elements of the binaries between both Jill, Tracy and Mary, and Isaac and Yale, serve to frame Isaac as a martyr-like figure, a sufferer of emotional upheaval and uncertainty at the hands of his two lovers and ex-wife, and a paragon of supposed virtue in comparison to Yale. In this sense, Allen simultaneously utilizes and augments Lévi-Strauss’s conception of binarism, with the amendment playing on the notion of oppositions within genders as opposed to simply between them. However, this amendment does not necessarily result in the elevation of women to more prominent or positive storytelling platforms, and it is significant that the greatest oppositions between these female characters primarily revolve around Isaac himself. Despite the fact that Tracy emerges as the film’s most well-balanced character (McCann 1990: 35), the nature of the farewell scene between Isaac

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and Tracy never puts his wrongdoing on trial in a comparable way to Yale’s in the confrontation scene, contributing to the erroneous setting-up of Allen’s surrogate as a ‘moral paragon’ of sorts (Meade 2000: 324). With even greater complexity, Isaac can be read as representing a binarism within the same character, and in doing so further validates the notion of what Smith usefully describes as ‘the two Isaacs’ (2016: 339).

‘May I just interject one concept at this juncture?’: Broadway Danny Rose, or Manhattan Part II? Elements of the tragic romantic hero, which are such a prominent aspect of the Woody Allen surrogate in Manhattan, were to resurface again in his 1984 film Broadway Danny Rose. Indeed, as Foster Hirsch notes, this is particularly pronounced in the latter due to Allen’s introduction of a ‘Chaplinesque pathos’ to his eponymous character (1981: 202). On both a textual and subtextual level, the two movies can be considered in conjunction with each other, perhaps most meaningfully in the manner that the latter appears to act as a corrective to some of the ‘wrongs’ done to Isaac in the earlier film. On the most basic aesthetic level, the two films resemble each other through their use of monochrome cinematography by Gordon Willis, whose work on Manhattan has been likened to the photography of both Andreas Feininger (Cardullo 2016) and Ansel Adams (Lax 1991). As Lax has observed, Broadway Danny Rose was not Allen’s first black-and-white film since Manhattan, with both Stardust Memories (1980) and Zelig (1983) being made in between. Yet the impact of this aesthetic choice has a notable connective effect between Allen’s 1979 and 1984 projects, something that is exacerbated by the very different storytelling tones adopted by both Stardust Memories, with its sense of sour dissatisfaction, and Zelig, which is as much about a rarely seen and overt technical ambition in Allen’s work as it is the theme of conformity and its dangers. Allen himself has claimed that the decision to use monochrome in Manhattan revolved around his and Willis’ thinking that ‘it would be fun to work in black-and-white and it would be fun to work in anamorphic, in real wide-screen’ (quoted in Björkman 1995: 107–8). The results of this decision have been variously interpreted, with McCann asserting that the cinematography evokes a bygone version of Manhattan in which the old New York haunts the film’s characters (1990), Smith stating that the film has ‘an unashamedly nostalgic look’ (2016: 320), and Cardullo noting that Allen ‘claimed he chose black and white because that’s the way his alter

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ego, Isaac, sees New York’ (2016: 147). Whilst Cardullo’s criticism of this as an aesthetic manifestation of Allen’s narcissism parallels similar narrative observations about Isaac made by Smith (2016), both of which identify a male-led self-centredness at the heart of Manhattan’s narrative, it is Smith’s focus on the film’s element of nostalgia that holds the key in connecting the two films and their centralizing of the tragic romantic hero. McCann develops this point further in his belief that ‘Gordon Willis’ black-and-white cinematography recalls the imagery of thirties Hollywood and the glamour the old movies imputed to New York as a setting for sophisticated romance’ (1990: 20). He makes further implicit connections between Manhattan and Broadway Danny Rose in his reflection that the latter is itself a ‘consciously romantic presentation of the real Manhattan’ (1990: 22). Though Allen refuted this in his recollection of not having to ‘seek out particularly beautiful or romantic places’ to shoot his 1984 film (quoted in Björkman 1995: 145), the notion finds validation in Hirsch’s assertion that ‘the black and white photography in Broadway Danny Rose appropriately places the action in a time that was, somewhere in an indefinite past’ (1981: 226–227). The hazy narrative flexibility afforded by this ‘indefinite past’ and the echoing of old Hollywood movies where the hero always gets the girl provide Allen the ideal opportunity to achieve the ‘triumph from tragedy’ for Danny Rose that is ultimately denied Isaac Davis. This fable-like aspect of Broadway Danny Rose, with Lax describing it as ‘part Damon Runyan, part show business’ (1991: 146), is enhanced by the narrative framing device that Allen adopts, one that differs crucially from the first-person narration of Manhattan. As Hirsch observes: In Broadway Danny Rose […] he uses voice-over simply as a means of underlining the ‘story’ status of his narrative. A group of comics gathered at New York’s Carnegie Deli commemorate Danny Rose by telling what turns out to be the saga of how a perennial loser ends up a romantic winner. That Danny’s unexpected romantic conquest is narrated as a story and one moreover which is embedded within a frame within the film gives it stature, though without making a fuss. (1981: 225–226)

Significantly, the film’s narration is also male in nature, albeit plural in this instance. Yet what we might describe as the ‘distance’ this affords Allen as screenwriter allows him to pivot more decisively towards the gentler view that he offers of Danny in comparison to that which he adopted for Isaac. As Lloyd Michaels has perceptively noted, Danny Rose appears as a caricature

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of the ‘New York Jew’ that Allen played in films such as Manhattan, only ‘without their urban sophistication or economic success’ (2017: 128). Much as Isaac is preoccupied by the end of Manhattan with issues of personal integrity, Danny is ‘all about loyalty’ (Lax 1991: 146). This parallel is manifested directly in the very different confrontation scenes that take place in both films. Whilst Isaac is apoplectic with self-righteous indignation at the duplicitous conduct of Yale, Danny’s realization that his newly resurgent singing act, Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte), is abandoning him for new management is greeted with a relatively quiet, exasperated, disbelieving resignation. This paralleling of key scenes is repeated again between the two films in the crucial closing sequences, during which Allen not only offers a conclusion to the morality tales that he has offered but also most overtly repositions his surrogate to be the beneficiary of his re-imagining of Manhattan’s ending. Much as Yale and Isaac competed for Mary’s affections in Manhattan, Danny and Lou end up as counterpoint options for former mobster paramour Tina Vitale (Mia Farrow) in Broadway Danny Rose. Her encouragement of boyfriend Lou’s disloyalty to Danny is complicated by her befriending of the latter, something that takes place during a madcap afternoon escapade on the way to the vocalist’s biggest comeback show yet. Having undergone the kind of guilt-driven recantation that proved so impossible for Yale to achieve at the hectoring of Isaac, Tina comes to realize her affection for Danny. She turns up at Danny’s apartment on Thanksgiving during a low-key, low-maintenance party for his remaining clients, seeking reconciliation with the down-on-his-luck personal manager. Uncharacteristically for a man ruled by unfailingly generous impulses, Danny spurns Tina’s entreaties. She departs Danny’s doorstep, leaving him to ruminate on his actions and their incompatibility with his philosophy of life. At this juncture, Allen recreates Isaac’s fateful run through the streets of New York to reach Tracy before she leaves for London, with Danny bursting from his apartment building and jogging to catch up with Tina, taking her presumably back towards the warm bonhomie of his ongoing gathering. The left-to-right tracking shot from across the street is almost identical to that in Manhattan, but with the key divergence of outcome. McCann sees wish fulfilment as a key theme in Manhattan, with the character of Isaac being on the verge of ‘faith and hope’ by the film’s largely inconclusive conclusion (1990: 35). In Broadway Danny Rose, the wish for human connection is actually fulfilled for Danny, and he is the embodiment of ‘faith and hope’ rather than just being on the verge of it thanks to the film’s addition of an

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‘extra beat’ to the narrative (Michaels 2017: 135), something that allows for the acceptance and reconciliation that is denied in Allen’s earlier film. Unlike the narrative bestowment of magnanimity on Tracy in Manhattan, in Broadway Danny Rose it is the eponymous protagonist who demonstrates the generosity of spirit. This maintains Danny’s position as the story’s fount of narrative decency, with the obviousness of his goodness being so pronounced that the actual verbal exchange between Danny and Tina on the street goes, unlike the famous closing exchange between Tracy and Isaac, unheard by the audience. In doing so, Allen has wrenched the very quality that set Tracy so positively apart from Isaac and used it to bolster the heroic aspect of Danny Rose, something that can be seen in the process to have successfully rewritten the ‘wrongs’ done to Isaac in order to present Danny not as a ‘tragic romantic hero’ but simply as a romantic hero. An analysis of Manhattan in the context of the classical storytelling devices that it utilizes and the manner by which they largely limit the positivity and scope of representations of women in Woody Allen’s fictional world considerably problematizes the question of whether or not Woody Allen can credibly by described as a ‘women’s director’. That being said, it is important to clarify exactly what we mean by this term. If a ‘women’s director’ – and in this instance, screenwriter – is someone who with some consistency places female characters at the heart of their narratives, then I would argue, as Allen himself has indirectly (Björkman 1995), that he is indeed such a filmmaker. If, however, the definition is in fact someone who through the deployment of their storytelling practices consistently affords female characters significant and positive narrative agency, then the picture becomes much more distorted. Though my consideration of his work here has been primarily in the context of Manhattan, the film functions as an effective microcosm of Allen’s creative practice during that period of his career. It was the first of his films to contain more than one leading female character, something that he was to replicate and expand in films such as Hannah and Her Sisters, September (1987), Husbands and Wives (1992) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). As the decades since Manhattan’s release have shown, Allen has gone further, basing whole narratives around leading female characters such as 1988’s little-celebrated Another Woman, the more recent Blue Jasmine (2013), which offered perhaps his most satisfyingly complex and interesting female protagonist, and 2004’s Melinda and Melinda, where Allen was to take Lévi-Strauss’s ideas of binarism a step further than he had before by placing two binary conceptions of the same character at the centre of his narrative, allowing him to explore his fascination with comedy

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and drama. These later films show Allen the screenwriter more interested in the possibilities presented by female characters within his narratives, although the extent to which they are lent true, positive storytelling agency is a question deserving further extended discussion. In his own rumination on Broadway Danny Rose and the subject of women in the work of Woody Allen, Hirsch shrewdly observes that ‘[w]hile Allen will never be a feminist hero […] admirable women who combine careers with full personal lives have become increasingly evident in his work.’ (1990: 219). Bearing this in mind, perhaps the most probing enquiries aren’t so much whether Allen is a ‘women’s director’ or ‘women’s writer’, but instead at which juncture of his long career we ask these questions. In this sense, we might consider the notion that there is more than just one Woody Allen, with the 44-year-old man who made Manhattan in 1979 being a less rounded, sympathetic and engaged writer of women than the 78-year-old man who made Blue Jasmine in 2013, or indeed the man whose 51st and latest film, Rifkin’s Festival, was released in 2020.

Bibliography Allen, Woody. (2020). Apropos of Nothing. New York: Arcade Publishing. Allison, Terry L., and Renée R. Curry. (1996). Frame Breaking and Code Breaking in Woody Allen’s Relationship Films. In Renée R. Curry (Ed.), Perspectives on Woody Allen. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., pp. 121–136. Björkman, Stig. (ed.) (1995). Woody Allen on Woody Allen. London: Faber and Faber. Blackwell, Marilyn Johns. (1997). Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman. Columbia, SC: Camden House. Brode, Douglas. (1991). The Films of Woody Allen. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group. Butler, Judith. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Cardullo, Robert J. (2016). Teaching Sound Film: A Reader. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. De George, Richard T. and Fernande M. De George. (1972). Introduction. In Richard T. De George and Fernande M. De George (Eds.), The Structuralists: From Marx to Lévi-Strauss. New York: Anchor Books, pp. xi–xxix. Dick, Kirby and Amy Ziering. (dirs.) (2021). Allen v. Farrow. United States: HBO Documentary Films. Echart, Pablo. (2017). Artistic Talent and Sensibility: The Dramatic Uses of Art in Woody Allen’s Creation of Characters. Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, 29: 1, pp. 57–70.

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Hirsch, Foster. (1990). Love, Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life: The Films of Woody Allen (2nd ed.). New York: Limelight Editions. Kael, Pauline. (1996). Hannah and Her Sisters. In Renée R. Curry (Ed.), Perspectives on Woody Allen. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., pp. 41–44. Kurutz, Steven. (2018). How Do You Solve a Problem Like “Manhattan”? New York Times, 1 March, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/style/woodyallen-manhattan.html. Lawton, Philip. (2018). Culture, capital and the big screen: tracing the changing dynamics of gentrification in the films of Woody Allen. Urban Geography, 39: 3, 367–387. Lax, Eric. (1991). Woody Allen: A Biography, Cambridge: Da Capo Press. Lee, Sander H. (2002). Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analysed: Anguish, God and Existentialism. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1972). The Structural Study of Myth. In Richard T. De George and Fernande M. De George (Eds.), The Structuralists: From Marx to Lévi-Strauss. New York: Anchor Books, pp. 169–194. McCann, Graham. (1990). Woody Allen. Cambridge: Polity Press. McCormick, Richard W. (1992). Politics and the Psyche: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Film Theory. Signs, 18: 1, 173–187. Meade, Marion. (2000). The Unruly Life of Woody Allen. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Michaels, Lloyd. (2017). Sweet and Lowdown: Woody Allen’s Cinema of Regret. New York: Columbia University Press. Mulvey, Laura. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16: 3, 6–18. Penley, Constance. (1989). The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Philaretou, Andreas G. (2006). Learning and Laughing about Gender and Sexuality through Humor: The Woody Allen Case. Journal of Men’s Studies, 14: 2, 133–144. Rodowick, David N. (1991). The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference & Film Theory. London: Routledge. Rotenstreich, Nathan. (1972). On Lévi-Strauss’ Concept of Structure. Review of Metaphysics, 25: 3, 489–526. Ryan, Michael and Douglas Kellner. (1988). Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Skoble, Aeon J. (2004). Integrity in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. In Mark T. Conard and Aeon J. Skoble (Eds.), Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong? Chicago: Open Court, pp. 24–32. Smith, Michael. (2016). Romance and Responsibility in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Journal of Ethics, 20: 1-3, 317–339.

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Thompson, John. (2007). Structuralism and its Aftermaths. In Pam Cook (Ed.), The Cinema Book (3rd ed.). London: British Film Institute, pp. 510–529. Turner, Graeme. (1993). Film as Social Practice (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.

Filmography Annie Hall. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1977 Another Woman. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Orion Pictures. 1988 Blue Jasmine. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Sony Pictures Classics. 2013 Broadway Danny Rose. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Orion Pictures. 1984 Crimes and Misdemeanours. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Orion Pictures 1989 Hannah and Her Sisters. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Orion Pictures. 1986 Interiors. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1978 Manhattan. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1979 Melinda and Melinda. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2004 Rifkin’s Festival. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Gravier Productions. 2020 September. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Orion Pictures. 1987 Stardust Memories. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1980 Vicky Cristina Barcelona. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: The Weinstein Company. 2008 Zelig. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Warner Bros. 1983

About the Author John D. Ayres is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Manchester. He has published peer-reviewed articles on aspects of 1950s British cinema in both the Journal of British Cinema and Television and the Journal of War and Culture Studies, and has a chapter entitled ‘Untraditional Traditions: Modern mediations on seasonal motifs’ in a forthcoming 2023 Bloomsbury edited collection focusing on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).

Part 2 Art and the Family

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Hannah and Her Father Decoding the Eternal Feminine Dianah Wynter Abstract The late nineteenth-century concept of the ‘eternal feminine’ denotes a sexist denial of the legitimacy of complex female psychology. The ‘emancipation of women’ confounded many thinkers of this epoch, including Nietzsche, who failed to comprehend why women would ‘emphatically and loquaciously dissuade man from the idea that [she] must be preserved, cared for, protected, and indulged like some delicate, strangely wild and often pleasant domestic animal’. Using Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as a theoretical framework, this study problematizes the title character of Hannah and Her Sisters, seeking to decode them as perpetuations of the Eternal Feminine or destabilizing forces that overturn the opressive myth. Keywords: feminism, philosophy, Nietzsche

Julia Kristeva proclaimed that every text is an intertext that borrows discourse and themes from previously crafted works. She, more than anyone, can make such an assertion, as Kristeva herself crafted her theory of intertextuality out of Mikhail Bakhtin’s exhaustive articulation of dialogism (Lesic-Thomas 2005: 1). Woody Allen is an undeniable master of intertextuality, who for decades has woven literary strands into cohesive cinematic works. In a number of his films, narrative threads are drawn from a Strindberg play, such as Match Point (2006) and Another Woman (1988) (Wynter: 139). At the heart of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) – one of his most enduring and beloved films with its themes of family, purpose, infidelity and creativity – lies an unlikely Strindberg hypotext: the strident, misogynistic handwringer The Father (1887). Hannah and Her Sisters and

Hall, Martin R. (ed.), Women in the Work of Woody Allen. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463722926_ch03

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The Father share to varying degrees an ambivalence regarding the subject of a woman’s place in the world. The flames of this debate were fanned unwittingly by Goethe in the early nineteenth century, when he introduced the Eternal Feminine (Eternal Womanly, arch.), a conceptual object that inspired the self-actualization of men before devolving into a tool used to legitimize the denial of complex female psychology (Kofman and Dobie 1995: 177; Egan 2019: 186). Through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, this study decodes the manifestations of the Eternal Feminine in Hannah and Her Sisters, which can be seen as Allen’s appropriation of The Father, Strindberg’s counterargument to the Women’s Movement.

The Confounding Feminine Before the curtain came down on the debut of Goethe’s Faust, the title character, having sold his soul, is suddenly redeemed by a rescuer who descends from above – a deus ex machina (‘god from a machine’) – and lifts the wretched sinner out of the pits of hell: Ever virgin, mother, queen, goddess Goddess, be thou gracious!… Here the ineffable Wrought is with love. The Eternal Womanly Draws us above. (1912: 342)

The Eternal Feminine is an essentialist, reductive view of woman as a ‘spiritually noble’ demi-goddess (Head 2013: 84). She upholds patriarchy by aiding and abetting its compulsive need to generate illusory ideas about itself, a common trait of any ruling class (Engels 2009: 10). De Beauvoir exposes the Eternal Feminine as a ‘lazy abstract cliché’ by which ‘woman’ was ‘objectified as the Other in ways that were both overtly despotic and insidious’ (de Beauvoir 2009: 13). Indeed, as the fervour for women’s rights spread across Europe, some of the most recognized thinkers of mid and late-nineteenth century were oblivious, befuddled or hostile (Offen 2000: 121). Wagner, for example, clung to the redemptive power of the eternal feminine, enhancing her with a long-suffering, selfless nature: [She] restores me to a pleasurable sense of existence; ever and again it is the ‘eternal womanly’ that fills me with sweet illusions and warm thrills

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of joy-in-life. The glistening moisture of a woman’s eye often saturates me with fresh hope again. (1905: xliv)

Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Allen references throughout his body of work, questioned why any woman would ‘dissuade man from the idea that [she] must be preserved, cared for, protected, and indulged like some delicate, strangely wild and often pleasant domestic animal’ (2015: 239). Strindberg went on the attack when the University of Stockholm appointed its first woman professor in mathematics, publishing a scathing article and calling her appointment the ‘subjugation of men’ (Schiebinger 1999: 171). Nietzsche and Strindberg were confidantes for a time, and both addressed the eternal feminine in their writings – Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil and Thoughts Out of Season (2015: 239) and Strindberg in his plays and novels. In Strindberg’s case, he introduced the concept sometimes as a minor character, dutifully in the background – e.g. Christine in Miss Julie (1888) and Nurse in The Father – or as a significant character such as the Lady in To Damascus (1898), the daughter of Indra in The Dream Play (1901) who descends from the heavens to understand the suffering of man, and the alabaster goddess in The Ghost Sonata (1904), ‘the marble statue of a beautiful girl, an image of the eternal feminine, which links past and present’ (Morgan 1985: 143). Morgan remarks that: allusions to Goethe and to Doctor Faustus are hardly necessary to confirm that Strindberg was consciously representing the eternal feminine generally in the Lady and, in specific aspect, through the Mother and lesser female roles. (ibid.: 46–47)

For good or ill, in the minds of notable nineteenth-century thinkers, the feminine was dehumanized as goddess, saint or succubus. The circumstances under which Strindberg wrote The Father were dire. He was the target of blackmail, was falsely accused of sexual misconduct, and was embroiled in a scandal that destroyed his marriage. His roman á clef, He and She, a frank chronicle of love and marriage, was banned and reviled by clergy as ‘a cesspool of iniquity that was spreading filth […] immorality and indiscipline through Sweden’s … youth’ (Prideaux 2012: 155) and ultimately published posthumously (Robinson 2005: 26). His long-time publisher rejected The Father, and Strindberg found himself shunned by every publisher in Scandinavia. Nietzsche became a lifeline for Strindberg during this dark period. Their correspondence was filled with impassioned words of support, encouragement and understanding, as both were facing

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loneliness, rejection and public contempt for their controversial views (Nietzsche and Strindberg, 1913: 201). I read your tragedy [The Father] twice with the greatest emotion. I was astonished beyond all measure to find a work in which my own conception of love – ‘war’ with regard to its means and in its fundamental laws, nothing less than the deadly hatred of the sexes, had been expressed in so splendid a manner … ahh what a light you have thrown upon your countrymen the Swedes… Yours, Nietzsche Nov. 27, 1888

Strindberg gratefully replied: It gave great pleasure to receive a few words from your master hand with regard to my much-misunderstood tragedy… An old lady fell dead during the performance at the theatre, another woman fainted, and when the straightjacket was produced onstage, three fourths of the audience rose like one man and ran from the theatre bellowing like mad bulls! […] Awaiting your answer, I remain with expressions of the highest esteem. Yours, August Strindberg

Nietzsche gushed, women fainted, audiences bolted in droves, and yet Woody Allen mined The Father for raw material to make Hannah and Her Sisters. Consequently, the narrative resonances in Allen’s appropriation reveal problematic attitudes toward the issue of a woman’s place, despite the 100 years separating the two works.

Narrative Iterations The protagonist in The Father is referred to as ‘the Captain’. He is a decorated officer and a formidable leader who has returned home to head his household, which is comprised entirely of women. It is the Captain’s responsibility to provide for his daughter Bertha’s education, and it is his legal right to determine what form her education will take. The major dramatic conflict involves the Captain’s wife Laura and her rejection of his decision to enrol their daughter in a teacher’s college in town. Laura insists that the daughter be allowed to follow her dream of becoming a painter and studying at

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home; the Captain would have to pay the art teacher, who happened to be in love with their daughter. Throughout the play, the parents battle for control of their daughter. As the law is squarely on the side of the father, the mother resorts to deceitful tactics to wrest control of their daughter from his authority. Laura sets in motion a series of deceptions, convincing the household that the Captain has lost control of his mental faculties. To further override the Captain’s legal authority, Laura fabricates a sexual encounter with another man years ago and claims that, as a consequence, Bertha is not the Captain’s daughter. The Captain is undone by this revelation. The entire foundation of his life crumbles. Unable to discern whether he was deceived in the past as a cuckold or is being deceived in the present as a chump, the Captain retreats into a helpless childlike state, rocked and coddled by the Nurse. The Captain is destroyed by what Strindberg coins ‘psychic murder,’ wherein a victim’s mental state is violently crushed by a relentless onslaught of lies (Strindberg 1968: 113). In the dramaturgical infrastructure of Hannah and Her Sisters, Hannah and the Captain occupy the same narrative space: the protagonist. Like the Captain, Hannah is the bedrock of the family upon whom everyone else relies, and like the Captain, she is deceived and betrayed by a spouse and a dependent family member. Hannah, like the Captain, is also a celebrated figure – an award-winning actress – who retires from the stage and returns to domestic life. Hannah is level-headed, sensible and a devoted parent to small children. Other conflicts the two works share include economic dominance, sexual betrayal and impotence. Hannah’s parenting of her adult sisters is at the forefront of Woody Allen’s story. Lee, Hannah’s youngest sister, occupies the approximate narrative space of Bertha. Lee borrows money from Hannah for night classes at the university, as she struggles to find herself. Lee, like Bertha, is in a relationship with a painter who adores her and wants to ‘teach her’. Holly, the middle sister, is a struggling actress, who also goes to Hannah for money to advance herself. Allen places Hannah’s husband Elliot in the antagonist’s role that Laura occupies in The Father. Both characters deceive their spouses and vie for control of a young female relative. Laura confesses to adultery and gains control over her daughter Bertha, whereas Elliot commits adultery and gains control over his wife’s sister, Lee. The Captain feels tormented because he is unable to discern the truth, whereas Hannah is tormented because she discerns the truth but Elliot refuses to admit it. Hannah and the Captain are devastated and confounded by lies, and neither ever discover the truth. Dramaturgically, Allen’s reversal of the protagonists’ sex serves to emphasize

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how significantly less empowered, motivated and purposeful the twentiethcentury women characters in Hannah and Her Sisters are in comparison to the nineteenth-century women in The Father. ‘He [Allen] seemingly wants to create a world of women and to invigorate cinematic space with female action, but these women once again exist as mere backdrop for male action’ (Allison and Curry 1996: 127). ‘One is not born Woman, one becomes it’ (de Beauvoir 2009 13). With this succinct observation of how a woman arrives at her place in the world, de Beauvoir dashes dominant essentialist views of woman, declaring that there is no inherent biological predisposition nor psychological inclination that would cause Woman to choose the stifled existence that she occupies in society. It is a role chosen for her and foisted upon her by patriarchal systems, the shackles of which, historically, she has been unable to cast off. In The Father, the male protagonist resists the shifting of women’s place in society, detests their desire for independence, and resents the new laws allowing increased autonomy of women. In Hannah and Her Sisters, the struggle continues as ‘Hannah, Lee, and Holly find themselves pitted against a stubborn patriarchy’ (Allison and Curry 1996: 127). Allen composes the title characters to be ambivalent about their own place. Hannah and Lee yearn for conditions more akin to the eternal feminine, i.e. to be a restorative force in the life of their man rather than for the goals of the women’s movement of their early adulthood. Of the construct of the Eternal Feminine, de Beauvoir notes that ‘Through her, passions are tempered; she is what is given to man to satiate him. Wherever life is threatened, she saves and restores it: she heals and strengthens.’ (2009: 19). Allen embeds these properties into the role of Lee, played by Barbara Hershey. Elliot (Michael Caine) is overcome with lust for her, and Allen gives Lee to Elliot to satiate him. Once they have consummated their affair, Elliot feels exhilarated, ‘restored, healed, strengthened’. Lee is an elixir, a balm in Gilead, an object. To draw attention away from Lee’s ongoing betrayal of her older lover and her sister and to maintain audience sympathy, Allen endows her with an inordinate amount of guilt and little self-awareness. More so than her sisters Hannah and Holly, Lee is feral, always looking for a man to provide her with security, stability and sex. When she breaks up with her lover, a painter named Frederick (Max von Sydow), Lee’s main argument is that ‘it’s not sexual anymore’. Frederick laments that he has nothing left to give her, nothing left to teach her, nothing left to provide. ‘I knew you would leave me’, he says, the implication being that he expected Lee to leave him once he ran out of provisions, leaving her without sex, children or marriage. Throughout the rest of the narrative, Lee

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has feeble moral qualms about her affair with her sister’s husband Elliot but releases them when Elliot assures her that the break-up of his marriage is inevitable. Lee makes no attempt to find out for herself whether or not this is true, as it is in her self-interest to simply take Elliot at his word. Lee is Nietzsche’s fantasy, a woman who wants to be ‘cared for, protected, and indulged like some delicate, strangely wild and often pleasant domestic animal’. Elliot’s lust for Lee is provoked not by love or desire but by his feelings of inadequacy in comparison to his wife Hannah’s strength of character. Furthermore, from a Freudian perspective, the taboo against seducing one’s sister-in-law is overlooked and heavily codified in Hannah and Her Sisters: The temptation of the sister-in-law exists less because she made reminds a man of his wife and his own sister than because the wife and sister together threaten a man’s patriarchal power; having both Women undermines their intimacy as it reassures the man of his exclusive and excluding desirability. (Lefkovitz 2010: 79)

Elliot’s behaviour illustrates de Beauvoir’s assessment of Nietzsche, whom she says ‘believes that the Eternal Feminine was exalted only during periods of weakness and that the hero has to rise up against the Magna Mater’ (Nietzsche 1913: 216; de Beauvoir 2009: 255). Elliot is Nietzsche’s hero, and Lee is the exalted eternal feminine. Hannah turns from the Eternal Feminine into the Magna Mater (‘great mother’), whom Elliot is driven to topple (de Beauvoir 2009: 258). In the early part of the film, Hannah is both eternal feminine and magna mater, and immune to ‘the problem with no name’, the existential crisis that gripped American housewives in the mid-twentieth century: It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered […] Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – ‘Is this all?’ (Friedan 1963: 4)

In fact, Hannah is the living, breathing solution to this problem with no name. She gave up her career, her place in the spotlight, her opportunity for achievement and recognition, all to build her world around her husband

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Elliot. She is ‘pure offering’ in Beauvoirian terms. ‘She forgets herself in favour of her husband, her lover, her child, she ceases to think of herself’ (de Beauvoir 2009: 431). She allays male dread that ‘femininity is in jeopardy’. Betty Friedan would liken Hannah to the ‘truly feminine women [who] do not want careers, higher education, political rights – the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for’ (1963: 12). Allen crafted Hannah as the essentialized woman, at ease with the gendered ‘ruling caste’ and ‘the state of affairs it created itself’ (32). Despite Hannah’s comfort with her subordinate place in the patriarchal social order, Hannah’s loving sacrifices are repugnant to Elliot, and ‘throughout the film, we see the efforts [by Hannah] on behalf of domesticity repeatedly undermined’ (Knight 1996: 386). This exemplifies de Beauvoir’s observation that the concept of woman making her life ‘a perpetual offering’ is inherently flawed: [T]here again is a cruel mystification, since what she offers, he cares not at all to accept. Man does not need the unconditional devotion he demands, nor the idolatrous love that flatters his vanity; he only accepts them on the condition that he does not satisfy the demands these attitudes reciprocally imply. (1947: 799)

In their final scenes, both Hannah and the Captain in The Father are worn down by deception. First, the Captain’s ego is crushed, his self-image as a man of influence and power is destabilized, as he curls up in the foetal position babbling a nursery rhyme. His mental and emotional castration leads to his physical defeat, his own home becoming his final battlefield. This scenario is emblematic of Strindberg’s nihilism, a tendency to which many artists were prone in the age of modernity. But at the end of the century, in The Dance of Death as in Munch’s paintings or Schoenberg’s first claustrophobic atonal works, which shortly followed, the interior as the domain of private illusion and painful memory, inhabited by figures who sit like prisoners behind doors they have often closed upon themselves in their unwillingness to confront the truth, becomes the nightmarish scene of these characters’ inner lives. (Robinson 2013: 82)

Secondly, the Captain must come to terms with the spectre of his own sexual impotence, as he accepts his wife’s lie about his daughter’s paternity. Similar to the Captain, Hannah undergoes a form of castration herself, in that her inner fortitude and her ability to trust her own judgment are deliberately

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undermined by Strindbergian psychic murder. When Hannah confronts Elliot, he berates her for being capable and strong. HANNAH Do you find me too giving? Too competent? Too […] too […] I don’t know […] Disgustingly perfect or something? ELIOTT Jesus, I told you! I need someone I can matter to!

‘I told you’, he insists, implying that, for Elliot, a verbal prenuptial agreement had been made, that Hannah would provide him with a perpetual supply of validation, provide him with the illusion of being greater than he is. ‘I told you’ implies that he gave advance notice and she agreed to the terms, and thus Elliot feels entitled to cheat on her for not being weak so that he might feel strong. Allen, in his appropriation, does not give Hannah a martyr’s death, as Strindberg crafted for the captain. In contrast to the Captain’s decision to lay down and die for not getting his way, Hannah chooses to endure. As the long-suffering, sacrificial eternal feminine, she chooses to withstand her husband’s unfair whims. In the end, Hannah is put back in her place: in bed with Elliot, on her back and vulnerable, lying beneath him, in the dark – literally and metaphorically. The day when it will be possible for the woman to love in her strength and not in her weakness, not to escape from herself but to find herself, not out of resignation but to affirm herself, love will become for her as for man the source of life and not a mortal danger. (de Beauvoir 2009: 799)

As desirable as de Beauvoir’s above prophecy may be, 34 years after she penned it, Allen crafts a world based on the former paradigm, a world in which, even after the second-wave women’s movement that changed the course of history, the ‘day when it will be possible for the woman to love in her strength’ has yet to come.

The True Woman In the caste system of patriarchy, observes de Beauvoir, the ‘true woman’ is one who is ‘frivolous, infantile, irresponsible, the woman subjugated to man’ (2009: 32). Hannah’s sisters, Holly and Lee, exemplify these traits in different ways. In her first scene, Holly (Dianne Wiest) asks Hannah for

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a loan of two thousand dollars and assures her that the money is not to buy cocaine but rather to shore up her catering business until her acting career takes off. Holly aspires to be an actress and singer but lacks the requisite talent. Like the character Lee, Holly reflects an aspect of Bertha, the Captain’s daughter in The Father who needs tuition money to pursue an artistic career for which she has no talent. In The Father, the Captain confides to his brother-in-law that he had Bertha’s paintings evaluated by an esteemed artist and they were found lacking. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen puts Holly’s lack of talent on display in the scene where she auditions for a Broadway musical and emphasizes her vocal shortcomings by following it with her best friend April’s mellifluous rendition of ‘The Way You Look Tonight’. Holly and Bertha also share a certain rebelliousness; in Bertha this is manifested in her conflict with her father over her schooling, and in Holly it is manifested in her love of punk music and her drug use seen in flashbacks. Despite Holly’s rebelliousness, she chooses to audition with the song ‘I’m Old Fashioned’ by Mercer and Kern. ‘I generally use Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and George Gershwin’, says Allen, standards from the great American songbook (Harvey 2007: 87). Rich with the works of Count Basie and Rogers & Hart, Hannah and Her Sisters continues this signature. Throughout his films, Woody Allen ties each piece of music to the narrative in a deliberate way. (His most masterful example of this is his thriller Match Point [2006], in which the lyrics of the Italian arias that comprise the soundtrack narrate the plot that unfolds on the screen.) In Holly’s audition scene, Allen uses her choice of song to foreshadow the ironic dénouement of her character arc, and April’s choice to infuse the subtext with the impending antagonism between the two friends: ‘Note how the rivalry between these two is reflected in the fact that they both choose songs by Jerome Kern.’ (ibid.: 69). Holly’s storyline includes a disastrous date that Hannah arranged with Mickey (Woody Allen), Hannah’s ex-husband. Mickey is a successful TV writer who later becomes Holly’s mentor and support system after she reinvents herself as a writer. The older lover/mentor of status is a recurring archetype in Allen’s films, e.g. Sam (Phillip Bosco) in Another Woman (1988), Judah (Martin Landau) in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Gabe (Woody Allen) in Husbands and Wives (1992), and Isaac (also Allen) in Manhattan (1979). Allen pairs this archetype with another, Nietzsche’s ‘frivolous, infantile, irresponsible woman’, e.g. Rain (Juliette Lewis), a college student in Husbands and Wives; Doris, a flight attendant (Angelica Huston) in Crimes and Misdemeanors; Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), a film dabbler in Vicky Cristina

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Barcelona; and Mary (Diane Keaton), a writer in Manhattan and mistress to Isaac’s best friend. Hannah’s, Holly’s and Lee’s romantic relationships are similarly coloured by the male dominance that typify Hollywood portrayals of heterosexual relationships. A series of events in Holly’s storyline bring this phenomenon into relief. At the outset, Holly attempts to assert her independence and march to the beat of her own drum, but she struggles with depression and chronic insecurity. Unlike her sisters, Holly is not in a relationship, nor is she preoccupied with being in one until she meets David (Sam Waterston), an attractive, married architect who expresses an interest in her at a party she is catering. David is also attracted to Holly’s friend and catering partner, April (Carrie Fisher). After their catering gig, David takes the two friends on an architectural tour of Manhattan, pontificating on various landmarks. Immediately, Holly begins to have feelings for him. When April displays some knowledge of architecture on their excursion, Holly’s warm feelings toward April turn abruptly into hatred, as her voiceover verifies: ‘I hate April. She’s pushy.’ Holly feels validated when David takes her to the opera. In a two-shot of Holly and David in his private box at the Met, he pours wine as Holly gazes adoringly at him. It is obvious that he has staged this tableau numerous times with numerous women who have gazed up at him with a similar adoration that ‘flatters his vanity’. Soon after David begins dating Holly, he invites April to the opera, and she accepts despite the fact that Holly is in love with him. Here Allen echoes his theme of sisterly betrayal that defines the Hannah-Lee-Elliot triangle. Exposition reveals that April and David are dating publicly and that April has altogether abandoned Holly and the catering business. Allen crafts the outcomes of each betrayal differently to reflect the disparity of what is at stake. The stakes involved in Holly’s loss of April as a friend and business partner are relatively low in comparison to what would be lost if Hannah’s marriage dissolved due to Elliot and Lee’s betrayal. Thematically, Allen establishes in the world of the film a distinct correlation between dominant male behaviour and inter-female betrayal. Allen portrays the notion of Sisterhood as a sham that exists purely out of necessity and is discarded in the face of male dominance and the prospect of creature comforts. The women characters in Hannah tacitly break faith with each other to secure the rewards of the male. The potential for women to betray each other does not end on the sexual-economic sphere in the world of the Hannah and Her Sisters. When Holly gets upset with Hannah for not lending her more money, Lee leaps to Hannah’s defence in an emotional display of guilt, a narrative trope that Allen employs to secure audience sympathy for

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a character who is behaving unethically; he similarly engineers audience tolerance for Elliot’s adultery with interior voiceovers in which he castigates himself for emotionally abusing Hannah. Despite Lee’s display of conscience, she makes Holly an unwitting accomplice in her betrayal by feeding her intimate facts about Hannah’s marriage culled from pillow talk with Elliot, which Holly puts into her play. Hannah is humiliated when she reads it and is given no explanation as to how Holly came to know such intimacies. This is Hannah’s destiny as the toppled Magna Mater. In Beauvoirian film theory: ‘Her drama is summed up in a conflict between her “viriloid”’ – that is to say her masculine qualities, determination, motivation, efficacy – ‘and her “feminine” tendencies’, sentimentality, interiority, and domesticity (2009: 77).

Hannah and Her ‘Other’ Sister Allen delves into the Beauvoirian conflict between a woman’s viriloid and her feminine tendencies in Another Woman (1988) with a more heightened and narrowly focused approach. In this dual appropriation, Allen dexterously extracts the film’s narrative and themes from Strindberg’s The Stronger (1889) and its structure from Dream Play (1901), Strindberg’s masterpiece of surrealist form. In Another Woman, protagonist Marion Post (Gena Rowlands) is a brilliant scholar who is on sabbatical to finish a book and finds herself battling a case of writers’ block, Allen’s narrative metaphor for her inability to express her feelings. As the Chair of Philosophy at an unnamed Ivy League sister school, Marion is a woman driven to succeed in a male-dominated field. As composed by Allen, Marion epitomizes de Beauvoir’s unyielding observation: ‘When the woman’s role grows, she comes to occupy nearly the whole region of the Other.’ Marion’s ambitious nature renders her as the ‘Other’ in her marriage, in her profession, and in her relationships with her father, brother, extended family and friends. Her otherness is the price she pays for being ambitious, both internally and externally. Like Hannah, Marion is unaware of how alienated she has become from her husband and family until she is betrayed by her closest friend and husband. In a flashback, Allen frames Marion’s mother in the far background in soft focus, his visual metaphor for the mother’s chronic remoteness that drove Marion to use achievement as a way to please her only emotionally available parent, her father (John Houseman). Hannah’s reticence in

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showing vulnerability is multiplied tenfold in Marion. Marion’s fear of being vulnerable metastasizes into acts of voyeurism, sonophilia and, eventually, stalking. Marion’s antagonists are other women who, like Lee and April in Hannah and Her Sisters, are eager to meet patriarchal expectations and play their assigned gender roles. Marion is deemed an ‘Other’ woman not only by men but by women as well. Allen leads Marion through an emotional dreamscape of memories, missed opportunities and betrayals, where she must express regret and contrition for being childless by choice unto the Eternal Feminine, an elusive, pregnant woman called Hope (Mia Farrow). It is problematic that Allen chooses to place his admirable and capable women characters into scenarios of abjection and humiliation that he contrives to convey that they brought upon themselves. He forces his own preoccupation with motherhood onto his female characters in these two films in particular; Lee says she wants to have a baby, Hannah says she wants to have a baby with Elliot, and Holly ends up pregnant in the end. By belabouring the issue, Allen is ‘thereby emphasizing the idea of the attachment of women’s fate to their bodies’ (Loyo 1994: 18). It is only after Marion repents of her childlessness that her writer’s block is lifted. Marion emerges from her road of trials into a state of inner peace, where she is inspired, aware and vulnerable, although her fulfilment is not assured. Rapf raises the question: ‘What is it that fills a woman’s life, and is it different from what fills a man’s?’ For both, Allen seems to suggest, it is giving in to passion, taking risks, not being overscheduled, and loving art, literature, music, and poetry. But for women, their creative outlet also seems to involve motherhood […] Although the prospect of fatherhood is also rewarding for Mickey, most of the men in Allen’s films, such as Larry, Isaac, and Alvy Singer, are creatively fulfilled by writing novels, plays, and movies. (2013: 267) Marion’s peace of mind is predicated on her saying half-heartedly, ‘it might have been nice to have a child’ when she really wanted the freedom to follow her ambitions. When Marion’s creative fog is lifted, the viewer is happy for her; when Hannah’s marriage to a liar and cheat is rescued, the viewer breathes a sigh of relief. And this is Allen’s super-power: his ability to defamiliarize oppression, to make it look like something other than what it is, and to alter its meaning. In the world of these f ilms, oppression manifests as equilibrium. In Hannah’s and Marion’s journeys, Allen imparts no judgment upon the patriarchal system that is hostile toward them.

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Artists’ Equity Strindberg’s The Father is the anatomy of a breakdown, and by proxy so is Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. In the former, the protagonist does not survive his breakdown; he instead breaks like a mighty oak in a hurricane. In contrast, Hannah survives, but what exactly does Hannah survive? Being a cuckold? Being gaslighted? The problem that has no name? It is all of these and yet none of these. Although Woody Allen inflicts his personal preoccupations on Hannah and her sisters, he nonetheless creates a valid backstory that elucidates their desperate need for domesticity. What does Hannah survive? In their own uniquely aberrant ways, she and Lee and Holly are survivors of their childhood, a childhood coloured by their mother’s drinking, their father’s philandering, and their parents’ individual selfabsorption. In Hannah’s voiceover, she confesses that her parents ‘loved the idea of having us kids, but raising us didn’t seem to interest them’. As stage actors, their work took them out of town for inconsistent periods of time, leaving Holly, Lee and Hannah neglected or abandoned (Hopper 2018: 117). Holly chose drugs to fill the void, while Lee moves from man to man in search of protection and stability. Lee has no feelings of love or attraction toward Elliot until he expressed a desire to provide her with security. Whereas Lee and Holly use men and drugs respectively to deal with the emptiness, Hannah’s drug of choice is domesticity. She is driven to craft an idealized homelife, a narrative to counter the scenarios of drunken recriminations that defined her childhood. The Thanksgiving scene where Hannah’s parents are singing and playing the piano to an audience of dinner guests belies the truth, that: Hannah, not her mother, occupies the center of this family and keeps it together. The parents are decorative. They are more show than substance, both as people and parents. Subtly suggested in the opening scene, the exposure of the darker facts about her parents and her upbringing achieves fuller expression. (Girgus 2002: 114)

Allen stages Hannah as a parental figure to her own parents as well as her sisters and her children in a scene where her father summons her to his apartment because Hannah’s mother Norma (Maureen O’Sullivan) has gone on a drinking binge following a disastrous commercial shoot. Hannah’s father Evan (Lloyd Nolan) accuses Norma of trying to seduce a young man on the set. Norma hurls insults at him, calling him ‘a non-person, a haircut

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that passes for a man’ and calling attention to his unreliable income over the years in front of his daughter. NORMA (to Hannah) He could never support us! It’s a good thing we had a talented daughter. EVAN I can only hope that she was mine. With you as her mother, her father could be anybody in Actors’ Equity! NORMA She’s talented, which means it’s unlikely she’s yours.

Here, Allen refers to the central conflict in Strindberg’s The Father: paternity. Although it is not central to the storyline in Hannah and Her Sisters, it adds context to Hannah’s and her sisters’ habits and fixations in their adult lives. Hannah has endeavoured to engineer a new reality, casting herself as the Eternal Feminine, the Magna Mater. She does not suffer the chronic dissatisfaction of ‘the problem with no name’ until her excessive sacrifices are rejected. In his article ‘Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters: Domesticity and Its Discontents’, Knight notes that ‘[o]ne person cannot make domesticity work all by him or herself, not even Hannah, nor should we want this. […] [D]omesticity, even here in the 1980s, remains an emphatically gendered value. Repeatedly, we find the women more supportive than the men of domesticity’ (1996: 386). Hannah is driven less by Beauvoirian ‘conflict between her “viriloid” and her “feminine” tendencies’ and more by a desire for normalcy. Hannah’s undoing, however, is Beauvoirian, as she is rebuked for her capabilities by a spouse who is selfish, jealous and immature, qualities her parents possess that continue to impact her life. Examining Hannah and Her Sisters as a dialogical response to Strindberg’s The Father, one might extract a progressive subtext, but it is an ambiguous one – as the two titles convey when contrasted. ‘The Father’ is the figure that defines the world of the play; he is the subject, without peer, without match; for without the father, there is nothing. The title ‘Hannah and Her Sisters’ by contrast implies a world defined by women, a world in which they have volition and where there is meaning in sisterhood. But beneath the first title lies another one, a title card reading ‘God, she’s beautiful’, which reveals the ‘she’ is not the subject but the object, not the one observing but the one being observed. Allen’s first shot of the film is a close-up of Lee peering out from behind a door frame; the camera then pans with her as

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she moves past the holiday party guests and carries her into a composition that typifies the male gaze, a framing that emphasizes her breasts and tight sweater, all accompanied by Elliot’s lustful voiceover and designed for male visual pleasure (Mulvey 1975). Allen applies this perspective to the title characters. As Allison argues: He seemingly wants to create a world of women and to invigorate cinematic space with female action, but these women once again exist as mere backdrop for male action. The point-of-view shot keeps these women as ‘looked-at’ figures, rather than as explored characters. (1996: 127)

Hannah and Her Sisters appears to have skipped over second-wave feminism; however, it may be viewed as a harbinger of third-wave feminism. Defined by unbridled individualism, self-interest and circumvention of male power systems through the use of irony and sexuality, the early version of this movement rejected the tenets of second-wave feminism (Baumgardner 2010: 158). Third-wave feminism was reconceived in the #MeToo era, as young women were forced to admit that while individuality has its place, there is strength in numbers. Allen endows Hannah and Lee with a modicum of autonomy before the last fade to black. Lee escapes from her oppressive roles as Elliot’s mistress and Fredrick’s captive pupil and marries an age-appropriate professor. Hannah returns to work as an actor, Allen satirically bookending her character arc with her two acting roles: she begins the film having just starred as Nora in A Doll House – Ibsen’s infamous heroine who casts off the shackles of domesticity to go in search of her true self – and completes Hannah’s arc with her accepting a role in a PBS production of Othello playing Desdemona, a woman destroyed in a love triangle of jealousy. In the denouement of Holly’s narrative journey, there is an encouraging Beauvoirian principle at play regarding the destiny of women in a patriarchal society: equality in the relationships between artists. After Holly completes her second play, she runs into Mickey, Hannah’s ex-husband, the television writer with whom she had a disastrous date at the Café Carlyle, a date throughout which Holly snorted cocaine. Having discovered her ability to write, Holly exhibits confidence and poise when she meets Mickey again. She shares her play with him, and he is bowled over by her talent. Mickey’s storyline is reflective of The Father in the references to the subjects of impotence, paternity and emotional breakdown, using them as the raw materials for Mickey’s human comedy. Via flashbacks and first-person voiceover narration, Mickey recounts to Holly his departure from his TV

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career and his existential crises of impotence and personal failure, and he confesses that he became so spiritually lost that he attempted suicide. She listens sympathetically, sparking a mutual attraction. To completely bury their differences, Holly does one of the twelve steps of the addict’s recovery and apologizes for her behaviour on their first date. Mickey’s high regard for Holly’s work is the respect that one artist gives another. In terms of dominance and status, he hasn’t worked in a year, so he’s in no position to patronize her or land her a deal. Secondly, he genuinely admires her writing, which means her work stands on its own merit and she can pursue opportunities based on her own abilities and her own agency. In Beauvoirian theory, Holly and Micky’s nascent relationship is a testament to equality between the sexes; theirs is antithetical to the relationships of Hannah and Lee, which are defined by sexual inequality. [A]mong artisans, spouses live on an equal footing; woman is neither a thing nor a servant: those are the luxuries of a rich man; the poor man experiences the reciprocity of the bond that attaches him to his other half; in freely contracted work, woman wins concrete autonomy because she has an economic and social role. (de Beauvoir 2009: 138)

Holly and Mickey are off to a great start, according to a Beauvoirian framework. Equality is one of the defining traits of the relationship between man and woman in the world of artists. But the world of Hannah and Her Sisters is a world invented by Woody Allen. In the final scene and final shot of the film, Allen echoes the opening scene and opening shot. He again uses a panning shot, this time to emphasize that equilibrium has been restored. The pan starts on Hannah’s father playing ‘Isn’t it Romantic’ on the piano, moves across to the voiceless Black domestic (yet another eternal feminine) lighting the candles on the elegant dinner table, and lands on Holly primping in the front of the mirror. This is a very different Holly. It is as if a new character has been introduced, played by the same actress and given the same name. Gone are the colourful scarves in her hair, big vintage jewellery, her spirited nature and everything about her that was artistic. She wears a tasteful grey sweater and skirt, and small teardrop earrings. This Holly is uncharacteristically silent. She speaks only when spoken to, replying directly to questions from Mickey. The equality of artists that defined them as a couple at the start is no longer evident. As Holly stands before the hallway mirror, Mickey enters the frames and wraps his arms around her from behind her, telling her she’s beautiful. He kisses her neck repeatedly while saying ‘I always had Thanksgiving with

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Hannah and I never thought I could love anyone else and here it is years later and I’m married to you and I’m completely in love with you… how are you gonna top that?’ To which Holly replies, ‘Mickey…I’m pregnant’. He kisses Holly passionately, a Hollywood kiss. The music swells and the picture fades to black. A miracle has transpired, and the miracle is exclusively Mickey’s. His potency has been restored. It is the narrative payoff to which Mickey’s flashback storylines were building. Allen decides that for it to be complete, he must turn Holly into everything Mickey wanted her to be at the Café Carlyle. He turns her into Hannah. This Holly negates everything that def ined Holly throughout the earlier part of the f ilm. She becomes an object, a signifier of Mickey’s potency. Of the long Hollywood kiss at the end, de Beauvoir would conclude, ‘It is… himself that he embraces when he holds in his arms this being who sums up the World, and onto whom he has imposed his values’ (2009: 20). The iconography of the scene, taking place in front of a mirror, is rich with meaning. Holly is the watery reflection and Mickey is Narcissus. Allen used the narrative device of replacing an established character’s personality in the third act in Another Woman with Mia Farrow’s character; from the beginning of the f ilm, she is an unhinged pregnant woman who doesn’t speak. In the last act, however, she suddenly becomes loquacious, condemning Marion for missing her chance to have a baby. In both third-act breaches of character verisimilitude, the subject is childbirth as the woman’s duty and ultimate achievement; Holly is revised and uplifted because she will become a mother, and Marion is shamed for rejecting motherhood by the altered woman with-child. ‘I’m pregnant’ is the last line of Hannah and Her Sisters. Allen gives no screen time to the possibility that the child may not be Mickey’s, the prospect that drove the protagonist of The Father to total breakdown. Instead, Mickey accepts Holly’s pregnancy as a miracle of feminine mystery, which de Beauvoir describes as a concept that men of her generation reached for when they could not understand something about their wives. Of all these myths, none is more anchored in masculine hearts than the feminine ‘mystery.’ It has numerous advantages. And first, it an easy explanation for anything that is inexplicable; the man who does not ‘understand’ a woman is happy to replace his subjective deficiency with an objective resistance… a mystery exterior to himself. (2009: 547)

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Conclusion Allen allows varying degrees of autonomy for Hannah, Holly and Lee in the third act, but the Eternal Feminine is always present. And like a game of tag between these sisters, one of them always has to be ‘it’. In the final moment, the upgraded version of Holly emerges as Goethe’s Eternal Feminine who descends from heaven to rescue Faust from the flames. In Beauvoirian terms, Woman is the supreme reward for him since she is his own apotheosis (2009 408). Holly’s wondrous act of deliverance is to redeem Mickey (Woody Allen) from the shame of ignominious impotence. With her as his Eternal Feminine, he has become a man, he has created life, and has the final word. As Rapf explains: … it is the Allen character, Mickey, who has the authorial and structuring final words – and they are about a man who marries his first wife’s sister – while the opening of the film also is from a male point of view as Elliot looks at Lee. […] as the film exists now, the title character, Hannah, is largely absent and ineffectual. (2013: 263)

The Father and Hannah and Her Sisters are both milestones in the chronicle of theatre and cinema, advancing the style of realism and advancing narrativity in the medium in which each was created. Allen’s screenplay achieved a remarkable coherence, despite its large number of main characters and storylines. It is the coherence one typically finds in literature, a media that has few restrictions of length or number of characters. When adapting literature to the screen, it is customary for storylines and characters to be reduced (Desmond and Hawkes 2015: 23). Allen, however, adds more characters and more storylines, which results in a rewarding quality of literariness. Furthermore, his meticulous formalism achieves the appearance of verisimilitude and naturalism rather than artifice until the last scene. For Strindberg, writing The Father was an act of experimentation in naturalism, which was at the time de rigeur in the works of Ibsen and Zola. Strindberg, having started out (like Ibsen) writing historical drama, including Master Olof in 1872, first established himself as a major naturalist with The Father, Miss Julie and Creditors in the late 1880s, and then remade, or reinvented, himself as a writer in order to return to the theatre in 1898 with To Damascus, the first of what he would subsequently call his ‘dream plays’. (Robinson 2013: 3)

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Before writing The Father, Strindberg spent a year researching the psychology and the physiology of the mental breakdown. He had decided that in order to achieve a powerful narrative arc, the protagonist had to begin as the most stalwart, honoured and invincible figure; he chose the proud Prussian officer (Prideaux 2012: 59). To foreground the narrative trajectory of the breakdown, Strindberg used the formalist approach of stark minimalism, with all of the action happening in a single room. This veritable tempest in a teapot was so visceral that it assaulted audiences’ emotions in an unprecedented way. Such narrative formalism in Hannah and Her Sisters and The Father is transgressive. Their transgressive properties pertain also to the psychological goals regarding audience reception, as both Strindberg and Allen are masters at the art of defamiliarization. Consider Laura, the Captain’s wife, fighting for the emancipation of her only daughter to do with her young life as she chooses. Laura’s cause is just, but Strindberg uses the narrative to create a ‘sign’ of danger, with Laura the deceitful manipulator as the signifier, and the entire women’s movement as the signified. Once one engages with the narrative, its overwrought climax obscures reason. In contrast, Allen scolded himself for the rosy ending of Hannah and Her Sisters that betrayed his view of life as meaningless: ‘if I had a little more nerve on that film, it would have confirmed it somewhat more […] it’s a habit of my growing up on American films, trying to find a satisfying resolution’ (quoted in Björkman 2004: 156). Although Allen regrets not disrupting expectations, with wit and nuance, he weaves dark absurdity into a bewitching ending. Like Strindberg’s Captain, Hannah is denied transcendence. Allen places her in the background, her confusion and emptiness upstaged by Holly and Mickey’s holiday miracle. Hannah and the Captain are absurd as ‘the metaphysical anguish provoked by the confrontation of the individual with the mystery of existence and the incapacity […] to give meaning to his presence are expressed in a form both nightmarish and fantastic’ (Esslin 2009: 23). Strindberg explicitly mourns the Eternal Feminine’s emancipation, whereas Allen’s approach is subversively ambiguous. To presume the rosy exterior is everything is to miss the depths of Allen as an auteur: Hannah is lost, Lee finds another father-teacher figure, and Holly is replaced by a doppelgänger. Allen films it through a mirror so that the world is backwards and illusory, and unless Woman escapes the looking glass, dread and horror await. ‘Yet, it is because there are real dangers,’ de Beauvoir proclaims, ‘real failures and real earthly damnation, that words like “victory”, “wisdom” and “joy” have meaning’ (1948: 34).

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—. (1913). Plays By August Strindberg. Second Series: There Are Crimes and Crimes, Miss Julia, The Stronger, Creditors, Pariah, trans. by Edwin Bjorkman. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons. —. (1964). The Father: A Tragedy in Three Acts; a Dream Play, trans. by Valborg Anderson. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Print. Wagner, Richard, and Mathilde Wesendonck. (1905). Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, trans. by William Ashton Ellis. United Kingdom, C. Scribner’s Sons. Wynter, D.E. (2015). Darling Have You Seen My Strindberg Book: Dialogism as Social Discourse in Match Point. In Klara-Stephanie Szlézak and Dianah Wynter (Eds.), Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 137–155.

Filmography Another Woman. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe Productions, MGM Studios. 1988 Crimes and Misdemeanors. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe Productions, Orion Pictures. 1989 Hannah and Her Sisters. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe Productions, Orion Pictures. 1986 Husbands and Wives. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe Productions, TriStar Pictures. 1992 Manhattan. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe Productions, United Artists. 1979 Match Point. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: BBC Films, Jada Productions, DreamWorks Pictures. 2005 Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Mediapro, Gravier Productions, Optimum Releasing. 2008

About the Author Dianah E. Wynter is a much-honoured filmmaker and a Professor of Media Theory & Criticism at California State University. Her current research interests centre on contemporary women auteur filmmakers and on consumerism and race in children’s programming. Her large publication background includes work on TV Studies and Film Studies, from The West Wing, James Earl Jones and Benson to the work of Woody Allen. She co-edited the volume Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen for Palgrave Macmillan.

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the Politics of Toxic Female Friendship Lauren Stephenson

Abstract The narrative of Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen, 2008) revolves, ostensibly, around the relationship between two young American women, undertaking a trip of a lifetime to Barcelona. This relationship, whilst central to the film, is a flimsy and inherently problematic representation of female friendship, which relies heavily on the understanding of female friendship as both competitive and conflict-ridden. The friendship, despite being introduced as a long-standing, close relationship, exists predominantly within the context of male conquest throughout the film. This results in the women’s characterisation being contingent upon their relationships with men, rather than each other, and requires that the two women be considered in constant opposition to each other. The tension inherent within Vicky and Cristina’s friendship betrays a common (mis) representation of the female friendship that has substantial footing in cinema more broadly, but which comes to bear with distinctive clarity in this film. Allen’s camerawork, dialogue and use of narration serve to further undermine each woman’s selfhood and identity, which in turn allows for their relationship to be similarly navigated and defined in, as this chapter will argue, reductive and restrictive terms. Beginning with the work of Hollinger (1998) and Tasker (1998) this chapter will discuss the terms under which the film chooses to explore friendship between women, regarding toxicity and competition as integral parts of its representation. Keywords: friendship, hegemony, representation

Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood. ‒ Oscar Wilde (1891)

Hall, Martin R. (ed.), Women in the Work of Woody Allen. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463722926_ch04

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Female friendship is a staple of the American cinematic landscape. These friendships take multiple forms and serve multiple purposes, but the female friendship narrative is perhaps most prolific within traditionally ‘femininecoded’ genres such as the romantic comedy or melodrama. These genres explore the bonds between women to varying extents (and with variable results), but in many cases their central friendships manifest as shallow and derivative, even toxic. Exemplary of this is the treatment of female friendship in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). This chapter seeks to explore the relationship between the film’s titular characters – a relationship that is harmful not only to the characters involved but to broader perceptions and expectations of female friendship. This exploration begins with the understanding that, despite the arguably prolific nature of female friendship in cinema, women’s friendships onscreen are often fraught with competition and mistrust and can be reformulated in moments to accommodate the arrival of a male lead. The scarcity of authentic and diverse representations of these friendships in cinema has been identified in the work of Hollinger (1998), Schreiber (2014) and others, who have sought to understand how and why representations of women and their friendships have failed to evolve or respond to the demonstrable shifts in social and cultural understandings of gender. This chapter hopes to further the discourse surrounding the filming of female friendship through a close consideration of postfeminist filmmaking contexts. The female friendship f ilm, Hollinger suggests, is ‘more accurately described as a recently developed subgenre of the woman’s film’ (1998: 2). The ‘woman’s film’ has its origins in the 1940s and according to Hollinger has three defining characteristics: it is a film made directly for a female audience, with a narrative that revolves around the actions and emotions of a female protagonist and that deals with issues of particular interest to women (ibid). The woman’s film, then, reconfigures our expectations of – and enhances our identification with – the female subject; as Gamman and Marshment might suggest, these films ‘[make] feminist meanings part of our pleasure’ (1989: 2). As the decades wore on, we saw the subject of the woman’s film become increasingly autonomous, and with that autonomy came the opportunity for the woman to cultivate her friendships with other women. Whilst acknowledging that both the definition and the discourse of the woman’s film relies heavily on a reductive and essentialist view of womanhood and those who experience it, the framework that Hollinger employs in understanding the genre has some interesting implications regarding the situation (and the limitation) of the female friendship film within contemporary American cinema.

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Defining Female Friendships By defining female friendship narratives within the broader parameters of the woman’s f ilm, Hollinger implies that the intended or dominant audience demographic for the female friendship film is women. This may seem like an obvious conclusion to draw, but this chapter contends that the female friendship film does not operate within (or belong to) any one genre or audience. Rather, female friendships are a narrative mainstay of contemporary cinema, and the female friendship film traverses – and occasionally transcends –conventional genre categorization. In a contemporary context, the female friendship is central to horror, action, mumblecore, romantic comedy, science fiction and more. However, in recognizing the prolific nature of the female friendship film(s), it becomes apparent that the audience is not, perhaps, the primary concern. To address the root of the pernicious mythology that has been curated around women’s friendships in American cinema, it is important to look inwards to the film text and its creator. The film and director under discussion here exemplify a broader trend within cinematic discourse, whereby the filming of female friendships is informed predominantly by patriarchal ideals of domestic womanhood and a persistent investment in women as the source or site of conflict. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (VCB) is a film ostensibly concerned with female friendship. VCB revolves around the travels and misadventures of two American women who are taking a break from their suffocating home lives to travel and explore Europe together. Arriving in Barcelona, the two friends jump into a taxi, and a narration begins. The narrator provides a precis for both Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), alluding to a long friendship built on co-dependency and low-level conflict. Whilst the narrator insists that the pair are similar in most ways, the women are presented as each other’s opposite in one fundamental and insurmountable way – through their vastly different approaches to, and expectations of, ‘love’: The two best friends had been close since college and shared the same tastes and opinions on most matters, yet when it came to the subject of love, it would be hard to find two more dissimilar viewpoints.

Vicky is characterized as a level-headed realist, settled with a fiancé who ‘understands the beauty of commitment’. She plans to marry him later in the summer. She has come to Barcelona to complete her postgraduate research in Catalan identity – when asked about it later, she is not sure what she will ‘do with’ the degree. Cristina, by contrast, is creative and

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wildly romantic. As is repeated many times throughout the film, Cristina is restless; she does not know what she wants from a romantic relationship (she has just broken up with ‘another’ boyfriend), only what she does not want. Feeling directionless after the end of her latest creative endeavour, the results of which she hated, she accompanies Vicky to Barcelona in search of new opportunities. In the taxi from the airport, the two women sit at some distance from each other and rarely share the same frame. Instead, Allen films them in individual close-up, then combines their two images in a split screen shot which conf irms the women’s oppositional relationship. Even more heavy-handed is the costuming: Vicky wears black, Cristina wears white. Aside from the very opening scene where we see Vicky and Cristina exchange inaudible words at the airport, the two do not speak to nor look at each other until they reach their destination, and even then, their conversation is mediated through the questions of their host couple. Whilst their supposedly vast difference in outlook might have signalled a complimentary and supportive friendship, it is framed here as a sign of incompatibility, necessitating judgement, competition and eventually contempt between Vicky and Cristina. Despite all the common ground that the two allegedly share, the importance placed on their oppositional understandings of love suggest that, for both, love is the factor of primary importance within their lives. Each woman serves to remind the other of what they lack in love; for Vicky, Cristina symbolizes freedom and spontaneity, whilst Cristina perceives stability and certainty in Vicky. This lack leads to both women feeling incomplete and unworthy in the company of the other. Vicky chastizes Cristina for being immature and naïve, whilst Cristina judges Vicky for not wanting more out of life than a comfortable relationship. The dramatic tension of the entire film therefore rests upon the inevitable failure of this central, years-old friendship, all because the two women cannot agree on the notion of love.

Narration and Agency Vicky Cristina Barcelona borrows superficially from the style and language of the women’s film; its superficial interests in the actions and emotions of the central protagonists could be framed as ‘of interest’ to an assumed female audience. However, the film wrests the control of the narrative away from both women creators and women protagonists, which is the defining tenet of the contemporary women’s film. In disposing with all but the aesthetics

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of the women’s film, VCB dismisses the most progressive elements of that very narrative, removing ‘meaningful social relationships’, undermining ‘sympathetic heroines’ and leaving the film completely unable to ‘challenge male dominance’ (Hollinger 1998: 3). To further understand how VCB works to objectify and undermine women and their friendships, one must begin with the film’s narration, voiced by Christopher Evan Welch. As with many of Allen’s films, VCB’s defining characteristic is the inclusion of an omnipresent narrator; it is he who introduces the audience to both Vicky and Cristina, he who characterizes their friendship as unstable, and it is he who provides an interior monologue for both women throughout the film. Perhaps it goes without saying that privileging a male narrator with the task of developing and explaining the actions and emotions of female characters reveals, at best, a profound inability to understand women as capable of articulating their own identities and expressing their own feelings. Far more sinister, however, is the possibility that the presence of Welch’s narrator serves to mould Vicky and Cristina into characters that comply with a male fantasy of female friendship – one in which women can only relate to one another (and their audience) through a male mediator. In taking away their ability to express themselves, Allen also removes any possible challenge these two women and their friendship might represent to a patriarchal status quo – not only deviating from the contemporary women’s film but working actively against it. Female friendship, its existence and its representation, can destabilize narrative norms that dictate that only men have the ability to grant women true fulfilment. In cinema, a healthy, stable and enduring relationship between women ridicules persistent mythologies surrounding women’s dependence on and deference towards men by rendering men secondary, if not wholly unnecessary to, the development of narrative, character and context within a film. Female friendship threatens to displace men as the centre of the narrative universe. As Cobb observes, this threat is recognized and often contained through the introduction of a romantic relationship, which sees the friendship superseded, the needs of the woman now fulfilled by a man (rendering her former friendship unnecessary): ‘female friendship is always seen as a threat to the patriarchy, and the structure of film plots and the insistent heterosexuality of Hollywood requires that the threat be contained. Usually marriage is the answer, because most female friendship films are set when women are single and fairly young’ (Cobb quoted in Clarke 2019). Furthermore, Schreiber (2014) posits that the framing of heterosexual romantic love as a ‘solution’ to the isolating effects of independence, career success and platonic friendship is a quintessential marker of American

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postfeminist cinema. According to her, the ‘typical’ postfeminist structure focuses: on a woman who is single (or in an unsatisfying relationship), strong and independent, and usually professionally accomplished. However, opposed to being satisfied, she remains emotionally and psychologically unfulfilled, and missing an unidentified ‘something’. The film is quick to suggest that this ‘something’ is the perfect romantic partner. (44)

In contrast, Deleyto identifies an alternative conclusion emerging within the postfeminist romance, asserting that romcom cinema of the 1990s, in particular, develops its utopian principles through the reinforcement of platonic female friendship towards the end of its narrative. Deleyto summarizes: ‘[i]f romantic comedy presents … a utopian space, it is not romantic love but female friendship that occupies this space’ (2003: 175). Deleyto draws this conclusion from an examination of films such as Mystic Pizza (Petrie, 1988) and Clueless (Heckerling, 1995) yet never fully reckons with the instrumental role that romantic bonds play in restoring or reinforcing female friendship within these films. Clueless, for example, does indeed end with the three central female protagonists reunited and fulfilled. However, the same conclusion also provides gratification through the formation and/or restoration of the three desired romantic bonds, promised to the audience throughout the narrative. Moreover, the restoration of female friendship is, at least in part, contingent upon the formation and success of the aforementioned romantic bonds. After all, it is our protagonist Cher’s older boyfriend, Josh, who encourages her personal growth. This growth, in turn, allows her to finally accept the burgeoning romantic connection between her estranged friend Tai and Tai’s beau of choice, Travis. It is only following this narrative development (facilitated by the film’s romantic connections) that Cher and Tai can begin to rebuild their relationship. VCB’s early narration, unusually, provides some semblance of Schreiber’s narrative resolution from the outset and seems to further challenge Deleyto’s more optimistic reading of the postfeminist female friendship. Vicky is already engaged when the film begins, and the relationship between her and Cristina only exists within the limited parameters of their trip to Barcelona. Despite the years of friendship briefly acknowledged in the opening sequence, we are provided only a glimpse of their relationship – that is, during the final months of Vicky’s life as an unsatisfied, unmarried woman. Vicky’s dissatisfaction and restlessness is palpable despite, or perhaps because of, her longstanding friendship with Cristina. As we’ll later discuss, Vicky’s

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eventual marriage to the bland but reliable Doug is not quite the romantic crescendo Schreiber describes, but it is (eventually) framed as the preferable alternative to the platonic companionship that Cristina offers, refusing the ‘utopian’ potential of the female friendship that Deleyto identifies. The film’s narration, as previously noted, works to further distance Vicky and Cristina’s relationship from the reassurance and stability that Doug is seen to offer. For some, the continual narration of VCB’s central friendship is simply a hallmark of Allen’s filmmaking style. For Bailey, ‘the presence of narrators distances the audience from the characters, their mediating presences making them seem to be operating under not-completely-benign surveillance… Allen’s films have seldom featured fully rounded characters, primarily because his understanding of human personality is largely minimalist and postmodern’ (2016: 329). Whilst admirers of Allen might wish to dismiss concerns about VCB’s narration by citing the ‘postmodern’ nature of his filmmaking, the narrator’s account of female friendship is not at all minimalist. Rather, he constructs depth of character in troubling ways, framing both Vicky and Cristina as directionless and dissatisfied, their relationship with one another unable to provide comfort or resolution. The film thereby creates an environment within which we, as the audience, know more about these two women than they know about each other. Their relationship seems hollow and ineffectual as a result. Moreover, deferring the assignment of women’s identity to a male narrator is not ‘minimalist’, either. It results in a harmfully and prejudicially underdeveloped caricature of both Vicky and Cristina and the friendship between them. Indeed, by the time the women are given the opportunity to speak for themselves at any length, to each other and the audience, we have already hit the moment of disequilibrium within the narrative – the arrival of local artist and lothario, Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). His proposition that Vicky and Cristina join him for a weekend of wine and sex provokes one of the few prolonged exchanges between the two, and it demonstrates the differing world views of the pair: Vicky: I hope you’re joking about going… Cristina: My god, this guy is so interesting. Vicky: Interesting? Are you kidding? What’s so interesting? He wants to get us both into bed. But he’ll settle for either, and in this case you. Cristina: Vicky, I’m a big girl, if I want to sleep with him I will, if not I won’t. Vicky: Cristina, he’s a total stranger, this is impulsive even for you. And, if I heard right, he was violent with his wife. Cristina: Well at least he isn’t one of those factory-made zombies, y’know. I mean, this would be a great way to get to know him…

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Aside from Cristina’s deeply troubling characterization of Juan Antonio’s rumoured violence as exciting (again, a notion inspired by male fantasy), this exchange is one of the very few moments within the film where Vicky and Cristina speak to one another without a third party present. As well as being the first instance of unmediated interaction between the two, it is also the last before Juan Antonio forcibly separates the pair’s narrative journeys. As the women debate what to do about Juan Antonio’s offer, the position of each woman within the relationship becomes clear. Vicky’s incredulous response to the proposal shows her stepping into a maternal role, chastizing Cristina for her recklessness, occupying a position of moral superiority within the exchange. Cristina, on the other hand, is clearly frustrated by Vicky’s rigid moral code, and her response includes a thinly veiled criticism of Vicky’s chosen partner, the straightlaced, financially successful Doug. Cristina, however, seems quick to persuade Vicky to accept Juan Antonio’s offer. Vicky continues to express a desire to ‘mind’ and manage Cristina’s behaviour throughout the weekend, in part it seems to justify her presence as a ‘chaperone’, sustaining her pretence of disinterest in Juan Antonio. In a later scene, Vicky berates Juan Antonio for making Cristina unwell (an overindulgence of wine and food the night before has left her bed-ridden with an ulcer). Once again inhabiting a maternal role, Vicky speaks with disdain about Cristina’s idealism, claiming it leaves her vulnerable to the whims of men like Juan Antonio: ‘[s]he’s a mental adolescent, and being romantic, she has a death wish. So, for a brief moment of passion, she completely abandons all responsibilities’. Citing Cristina’s perceived emotional immaturity and ill-informed expectations of romance, Vicky manages to absolve Cristina of any ill consequence of her own actions whilst also managing to credit Juan Antonio with complete control over Cristina’s emotional and physical wellbeing.

Desire and Crisis Juan Antonio’s arrival signals the beginning of an existential crisis for both women, but particularly Vicky. Her desire to live a stable and sensible life is thrown into chaos by the magnetic appeal of Juan Antonio and his ‘devil may care’ lifestyle. Upon their arrival in Barcelona, their host, Mark, asks smugly what Vicky is planning to do with her degree. Seeing Vicky search vainly for an answer, Mark’s wife Judy comments: ‘[s]he’s marrying this wonderful man in the fall, and all of her conflicts will be resolved when he makes her pregnant’. Whilst this comment reveals Judy’s bitterness towards

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the underwhelming reality of her own marriage, it also works to foreshadow and enhance the crushing inevitability of Vicky’s romantic endeavours. Whilst Cristina seems to have embraced crisis as a near-constant state, the challenges Barcelona presents to Vicky’s certainty of her life’s plan is more unexpected and profound. The notion of crisis is central to Allen’s filmography, which is understood by many to have paved the way for the twenty-first-century advent of ‘mumblecore’ cinema, ‘a corpus of films that are characterised by extreme stasis, indecision and lassitude… mumblecore deals with situations of protracted liminality in which the everyday or pedestrian figures as, or indeed is, crisis’ (Rogers 2015: 154). Allen’s filmmaking is often credited as foundational to the development of the mumblecore film, and VCB invests wholly in a mumblecore-inflected narrative. Vicky and Cristina’s ‘Americanness’ in a European setting ensures their liminality, as does their undoubtedly upper-middle class lifestyle. Whilst the two characters may be framed as binary opposites, they have both been drawn to Barcelona as a fear-based response to the stasis that defines their home lives – Cristina’s career has stalled, and Vicky’s relationship is flatlining. If we are able to read their friendship through a mumblecore lens, the hollow nature of it begins to make more sense. These women are subject to a stasis, an ennui, that either allows for or insists upon their continued investment in a friendship that has ceased to work for either one of them. Each makes effective use of the other to deflect away from their own indecision and liminality, a co-dependency that requires the two women to gravitate back towards each other in the wake of their relationship(s) with Juan Antonio. This female friendship therefore occupies both the margins and the central role in VCB’s narrative. It is the one constant within a chaotic and disorganized narrative, but it is also subjected to persistent minimization within the narrative. It is a framing device that, for the majority of the film, finds itself neglected in favour of romantic relationships. This drift from friendship to romantic entanglement (and back again) is also endemic of mumblecore cinema and its filmmakers, as demonstrated by some of the most prolif ic mumblecore creators – Lena Dunham, Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig. This fluidity itself often leads once more to parallels being drawn between Allen and mumblecore filmmakers, as Martin observes: ‘[a]ll the former mumblecore affiliates have drifted … to modern forms of romantic comedy – and therefore all of them, whether they like it or not, exist in the long shadow cast by Woody Allen over this genre since at least Annie Hall (1977)’ (2018: 19). However, one distinct difference between the mumblecore filmography and Allen’s film is that the former demonstrates an intermittent interest in exploring friendship and its representation

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(albeit through a predominantly white, male lens). Herein lies one of the many problems inherent to Allen’s work (and the work of many ‘auteurs’) that VCB brings to the fore. Allen’s own mythology and self-made brand of androcentrism makes it impossible for the representations of women and their friendships in his film to transcend the harmful and archaic standard set by the filmmaker himself. Therefore, the relationship presented in VCB is not an isolated problem – it is both evidence of and incitement to a deeply derogatory framing of relationships between women. However, some critics have argued that Allen’s representation of female friendship within the film has its strengths. Fuller argues that the backlash the film faced upon its release, predominantly from feminist critics, is based more on a historical dissatisfaction with Allen’s modes of representation rather than being a fair assessment of VCB as an isolated text. Citing the common criticism of Allen’s writing and casting young women and older men as his romantic leads, Fuller draws attention to the comparatively less-pronounced age gap between Vicky, Cristina and Juan Antonio (which he predicts to be around 16 years). He goes on to make an argument for the value and progression he perceives within the characters of Vicky and Cristina: [g]iven the film’s insouciant, quasi-comic tone, there’s an unexpected power in the three women’s collective ardour that’s been neglected in reviews. Allen’s focus is what women want, or think they want, and it turns out it’s not a Spanish bull – not even one with a paintbrush and a private plane (2008: 27)

He then concludes that ‘[l]ike the other young women enthralled by older men in Allen’s films, they are works in progress. They testify that Allen’s own restless quest for the unobtainable – that obscure object of desire – is inconcludable.’ (ibid.). The argument Fuller seems to be making here is that, in Cristina’s eventual rejection of Juan Antonio and Vicky’s forcible repression of her own feelings towards him, somehow a moment of empowerment has occurred for the two women. Allen is not expecting the women to achieve perfection, for themselves or for the audience, and in this acknowledgement is granting the pair the liberty to continue the search for the ‘unobtainable’. This might be a more convincing reading had the film concerned itself, at any point, with the growth and development of the two women outside of the context of a highly eroticized love triangle, controlled almost entirely by an older man. As for referring to the ‘collective ardour’ of the three central women (which includes Juan Antonio’s ex-wife, Maria Elena, played by Penelope Cruz) – this seems to imply a mutual interest

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and support between the women that is rarely, if ever, evident in the film. Upon Juan Antonio’s arrival, it becomes clear that the friendship between Vicky and Cristina is little more than a foil for the comparison of the pair’s respective relationships with the men in their lives, leaving the friendship as a mere narrative function or device within a broader exploration of women’s relationship with the concept of ‘love’ and the men that may or may not offer them an experience of it. Finally, regarding the argument that an antidote to the criticism the f ilm received is Allen’s interest in what women think and want, this author agrees that the film expresses interest in this area but would also urge caution in understanding that to mean that Allen’s own perspective on women’s wants and needs works to the benefit of the women represented, or indeed, that his representation of those wants and needs has even been created with women and their desires in mind. The notion that Allen is exploring his own liminality through Vicky and Cristina’s experiences eradicates the two women’s subjectivity and notions of selfhood (instead, they become expressions of the male psyche) and, most importantly, this also minimizes gender as a key component in how that liminality is constructed and perpetuated. Then again, as Hannah McGill powerfully articulates: ‘The idea… that meaningful experience transcends gender is perhaps easier to swallow if you are of the gender that has been in a historical position to present its concerns and priorities as universal’ (2018). Furthermore, the f ilm draws upon a postfeminist understanding of womanhood to communicate a message that could be considered staunchly anti-feminist in nature. Both Vicky and Cristina are the quintessential postfeminist figures – each ‘enjoys’ the social, intellectual and physical autonomy of a postfeminist age, and they wholeheartedly believe that it is they who set the parameters and boundaries within their own lives. Neither woman labours under the restrictive mores of feminism, characterized in a postfeminist context as ‘rigid, serious, anti-sex and romance, difficult and extremist’ (Negra 2009: 2). Moreover, both women demonstrate a reliance upon, and security within, American consumer-capitalist mores. Vicky’s fiancé Doug is the embodiment of yuppie masculinity, and his financial security and social standing are idealized by her and form the basis of their relationship. Beyond Juan Antonio and his father, we rarely see either Vicky or Cristina engage with anyone outside of the wealthy American ex-pat community to which their hosts belong. Despite Cristina’s tangible disdain for Doug and her experimentation with Juan Antonio and the liberal, anti-consumerist community he represents, she is no more invested in abandoning capitalist structures than Vicky. The pair’s final rejection of

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Juan Antonio, then, serves less as a sign of their individual autonomy and empowerment and communicates more about their inability to live outside of the commodification and consumerism integral to their American ideals. These women are also undone by the myriad choices and challenges afforded them in postfeminist culture. The stasis and indecision previously discussed is arguably framed as the result of both women having so many options and yet no true aim or calling that would necessitate committing to a path or decision. Their relationship with one another becomes a kind of crutch. The women have known each other since college – a time when decisions were yet to be made, definitive answers were yet to be given. Their continued presence in each other’s lives seems a reassurance; each is fortified by the awareness that the other is equally as directionless. Their friendship fixes them to a place of immaturity and arrested development, which, for Negra, is another defining characteristic of the postfeminist text, one that is ‘fundamentally uncomfortable with female adulthood itself, casting all women as girls to some extent’ (2009: 12). In having no resolute place in their world, no tangible end goal nor fulfilment within their romantic relationships, both Vicky and Cristina are burdened with the risk of not fulfilling their postfeminist potential. Their naivety, immaturity and uncertainty in the face of so many possibilities lead to a profound restlessness and dissatisfaction. Standing on the brink of adulthood, they have no stable or substantial way of negotiating selfhood or constructing their own identity. Overwhelmed by choice, Vicky resorts to the institution of marriage and the value of financial security, whilst Cristina becomes a kind of cultural chameleon whose identity is malleable, forever altering to reflect the priorities and lifestyles of those around her. In so harshly representing the postfeminist state, the film appears to extoll the virtues of a pre-feminist age, where parameters were fixed and choices limited. The women have become untethered without the patriarchal structures that would once have attributed their identity to them in a much more forceful manner (the very same structures that various feminisms have sought to dismantle). In lieu of a solid identity, the women become, instead, personifications of some nebulous (mis)understanding of twenty-first-century womanhood, from a distinctly anti-feminist perspective.

Friends in Chaos Whilst on the outside of the central relationship, Maria Elena’s presence within the film as an agent of chaos must also be addressed. For the first

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act of the film, Maria Elena is talked about in abstract, hushed tones. She only becomes a corporeal reality within the narrative following a suicide attempt, after which she moves into Juan Antonio’s house, where he and Cristina are now living together. True to form, Cristina and Maria Elena are immediately mistrustful of one another, and once more we see a competitive dichotomy established between the two. Maria Elena’s inherent creativity and artistry triggers Cristina’s insecurities around her supposed lack of talent. Where Maria Elena is resolutely and unapologetically herself, Cristina once again attempts to mould herself to the changing dynamics within the home. Overwhelmed by the mythology that preceded her arrival, Cristina is cowed and apologetic in Maria Elena’s presence. Maria Elena’s unpredictability also starkly underlines the sheer predictability of Cristina’s own behaviour; despite her attempts to cultivate a spontaneous and counter-cultural lifestyle, it becomes quickly apparent that Cristina is living out a cyclical pattern of rebellion and return. Even Vicky’s fiancé Doug seems to understand, and dislike, Cristina’s patterns of behaviour when he comments: ‘I love her because she’s your friend, but I’ve often warned you about her … she’s an unhappy person. She can’t part with that self-image she has of the “oh-so-special woman”, the artist trying to find herself. I find her contempt for normal values pretentious, it’s a boring cliché.’ Finally, Maria Elena is characterized through the extremity of her behaviour and the intensity with which she experiences her emotions, drawing into sharp relief the performativity and superficiality of Cristina’s own emotional identity. Maria Elena’s emotional intensity is viewed as both erotic spectacle and as evidence of a mental illness. Allen resurrects the hysterical woman archetype here, persisting under the fantasy that women are inherently irrational, emotionally unstable and, ultimately, deceitful and dangerous. A trope particularly prevalent in Gothic literature, where Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick finds the ‘classic hysteric’ (1989: vi), the hysterical woman has come to be widely understood as a manifestation of all deemed unnatural or abnormal about femininity, as constructed by a male medical professional, creator or narrator. However, Elaine Showalter finds within the dominant feminist reading of hysteria a failure to address the potentially subversive nature of hysterical articulation, claiming that ‘what Freud took as hysterical narrative and tried to reshape in terms of the women’s plots of his day may have been the unfamiliar voice of a more spontaneous but coherent and normal female consciousness’ (1993: 32). In other words, hysteria as we commonly understand it in popular culture may well be evidence of attempts by women to challenge or wholly reject patriarchal linguistic and narrative structures – hysteria is therefore used as a tool to

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denounce attempts at expression and identification that come from outside of the established male order. Maria Elena’s presence within the film is certainly a destabilizing force but a temporary one, and any subversive challenge she might represent is undermined by the film’s framing of her extreme behaviour and the treatment she receives within her relationship with Juan Antonio. It is important not to justify or minimize how much of Maria Elena’s characterization revolves around the fetishization of her fragile mental state, a characterization that treats her suicidal and violent behaviours as some form of erotic spectacle. She spends much of her screen time tear-stained, wild-eyed, in a state of undress, desperately attempting to communicate with Juan Antonio in Spanish, whilst he stubbornly insists she ‘speak English’ so that Cristina can understand her. This insistence upon Maria Elena speaking English in front of Cristina effectively allegorizes how attempts at subversive or alternative expression, such as those identified by Showalter, are contained, controlled and eventually neutralized. Further compounding this notion is Maria Elena’s allegation that Juan Antonio stole her artistic style, a claim that is quickly dismissed by him, then never spoken of again. Juan Antonio’s art, most likely the result of Maria Elena’s labour, brings him celebrity and renown. Meanwhile, Maria Elena’s art is superseded by whispered stories of her chaotic, violent behaviour. In many ways, Maria Elena’s arc demonstrates, but does not challenge, the process of exploitation and appropriation that Allen himself has repeated in commandeering narratives of female friendship for his own ends. In the end, the challenges Maria Elena represents to the standards and expectations of both Vicky and Cristina are tangible but fleeting, because at the conclusion of the film, Maria Elena recedes back into the realm of the myth from whence she emerged. After Maria Elena’s arrival, Cristina eventually becomes a facilitator to Maria Elena’s relationship with her ex-husband – the brief affair between all three of them allows for Juan Antonio and Maria Elena to co-exist in relative peace, and both enjoy a period of creative productivity. Relations thaw between Maria Elena and Cristina, and the former becomes a kind of mentor, encouraging Cristina’s photography and even becoming the subject of some of her work. Once again, Cristina finds in this relationship a maternal figure, and yet unlike the relationship with Vicky, this one seems, temporarily at least, to nourish and support her in her endeavours. In an interesting development, when Cristina eventually states her intentions to leave the home, it is Maria Elena, not Juan Antonio, who is truly hurt and upset by the news. Given the narrator’s earlier observation that, as an artist, Juan Antonio ‘needed always to live with a woman’, it is perhaps not

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surprising that he is so unaffected by Cristina’s decision – a woman can be any woman, so as far as Juan Antonio is concerned, he is not losing anything (or anyone) he cannot replace. Yet it seems that Cristina’s decision to leave is predominantly based upon her dissatisfaction with Juan Antonio and his failure to live up to her expectations. Her relationship with Maria Elena is relegated to collateral damage in this regard, resigning both women to further unhappy relationships apart from one another. That neither woman can conceive of a rewarding relationship between the two of them without the involvement of Juan Antonio speaks volumes. Cristina’s departure from Maria Elena and return to Vicky might therefore suggest not a rejection of Juan Antonio per se but rather a rejection or refusal of a healthy relationship between two women. Cristina will go on seeking fulfilment, and this provides an irony that is understated, if not entirely unnoticed, by Allen’s script. Without her, the marriage of Juan Antonio and Maria Elena once again falls apart. Upon learning of the love triangle between Cristina, Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, Vicky admires Cristina’s ‘courage’. Cristina’s faux nonchalance regarding the affair, and in particular her intimacy with Maria Elena, seems to shock the straightlaced Doug. Aware of Doug’s scepticism about her lifestyle and informed by her perception of Doug as a ‘factory-made zombie’, Cristina weaponizes her relationship with both Maria Elena and Juan Antonio against him; using her sexual experiences as an othering device, she seeks to prove that she is not similarly oppressed by the heteronormative structures that dictate Vicky and Doug’s relationship. This once again reduces a relationship between two women to the sum reaction of its male beholders. In this case, the treatment of Cristina and Maria Elena’s relationship also invests in the deeply harmful characterization of the same-sex relationship as a temporary phase of experimentation. Once more, we are reminded that there are only two ways in which women can relate to one another within dominant cinematic discourse: through conflict or sex. In the absence of either, the relationship between Maria Elena and Cristina ceases to exist. The use and misuse of this relationship within the narrative appears deeply exploitative of the two women involved (this exploitation is further compounded when one considers how prominently the love scene between Cruz and Johansson featured in both the publicity for and critical response to the film). Moreover, that the love scene between Maria Elena and Cristina is recounted in conversation as an anecdote, and filmed as a memory, leaves the ownership of that very moment up for negotiation. Is this scene Cristina’s memory? Is it the result of Vicky’s envious imagination? Or, perhaps more concerning, does the scene belong to Doug who, despite

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his better judgement, cannot help but visualize the story being told to him? Indeed, given that this scene is the only love scene in the film that does not occur in real time, who is to say that it happened at all? Upon abandoning Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, Cristina temporarily flees to France before re-joining Vicky in Barcelona for their journey home. In Cristina’s absence, Vicky is almost seduced once more by Juan Antonio, but his pursuit of her is once again cut short, this time by the explosive reappearance of Maria Elena, armed with a gun. Having wrestled the gun from her, Juan Antonio proceeds to accidentally fire the weapon grazing Vicky’s hand with the bullet. Confronted with a tangible, corporeal consequence of her infidelity, Vicky immediately realizes that her desire for ‘another life’ is pure fantasy, one which, when realized, quickly loses its appeal. She may not be happy with Doug, but she at least knows what to expect from that relationship. Having each survived Juan Antonio, the two women eventually leave Barcelona, fully aware of what they do not want from life, yet profoundly dissatisfied with what they already have. The friendship between the two barely merits a mention in the narrator’s summative statement, which accompanies a final scene in which Vicky, Cristina and Doug all descend an escalator in the airport. Once again, neither woman speaks nor looks at the other. It would appear that their experiences in Barcelona have led the two women to better understand one another, and yet that is not the narrative resolution that the narrator takes from the story. Could it be that a friendship now so devoid of conflict has ceased to be of interest or of use? As Hollinger suggests, conflicts between women are an immeasurably useful tool for narrative containment, serving to re-establish the dominance of the active male agent: [b]y focusing so strongly on conflicts between women, [these narratives] obscure other issues related to women’s position in society, relieve men of any responsibility for women’s problems, and suggest, instead, that women should grant men primary importance in their lives because they are the only ones upon whom women can rely. (1998: 207)

Emphasizing the resolution of the conflict between them might undermine the androcentric interests of the entire film whilst also allowing space to identify and challenge the litany of abusive, exploitative and predatory behaviour that has truly defined their summer abroad. Moreover, it stands to reason that Allen might lose interest in female friendship once it ceases to be useful, given that its inclusion was a mere narrative device to begin with. The concluding narration emphasizes the lack of progress made by

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the two women. Cristina is still searching, and Vicky is still dissatisfied, and so, in many ways, the film ends precisely as it began.

Conclusions As this chapter hopes to have demonstrated, VCB scraps the female friendship narrative for parts, in service of constructing a male conquest narrative. Juan Antonio’s libidinous nature and pursuit of the two friends dictates the initial structure, intermediate fluidity and eventual form of Vicky and Cristina’s friendship. As with so much of cinema, classical and contemporary, these women and their friendship cannot exist in isolation but must be framed through romantic endeavours. In this way, Allen’s film seems to ridicule both Vicky and Cristina for their romantic notions whilst also insisting upon their investment in them to ensure their compliance within an androcentric narrative. Whilst Vicky and Cristina may walk away from their romantic entanglements with him in the closing scenes, Juan Antonio is still granted ownership over the story of Vicky and Cristina in Barcelona. This corresponds to the age-old cinematic imperative that dictates that men are the active agents in romantic narratives, whilst women remain passive recipients of their advances. Jessica Kiang describes this as the ‘mine’ impulse: I understood the ‘mine’ impulse through the eyes, lusts, lips and fists of male protagonists whose greedy agency over their actions has never been in question – and whose straightforward entitlement to the gratification of their unembarrassed carnal instincts has not, until recently, been substantially challenged. The visual language of romantic conquest and ownership is the province of men, after all. (Newland 2020: 88)

The central problem of Vicky Cristina Barcelona is best expressed within the narrative itself: in one particular scene, Cristina is seen photographing women from a distance but is rarely, if ever, seen to communicate with them. Once again, the physical manifestation of womanhood is given precedence over its experiences and relationships. Accidentally or not, in his orchestration of these scenes, Allen allegorizes his own blind spot(s) and calls attention to the profoundly hollow nature of his engagement with female friendship. In a film that seems to value the aesthetics of women’s relationships far more highly than the substance of them, this is perhaps Vicky Cristina Barcelona’s most honest scene.

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Bibliography Bailey, Peter. (2016). The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Clarke, Cath. (2019). .From Thelma and Louise to Animals: How female friendships on screen got real. The Guardian. Deleyto, Celestino. (2003). Between Friends: Love and Friendship in contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy. Screen. Vol. 44, No. 2, 167–182. Fuller, Graham, (2009). No City for Old Men’. Sight and Sound. Vol. 19, Issue 2, 24–28. Gamman, Lorraine, and Margaret Marshment. (1989). The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture. London: The Women’s Press. Harzewski, Stephanie, (2011). Chick Lit and Postfeminism. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press). Hollinger, Karen. (1998). In the Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Martin, Adrian. (2018). Every Other Day: Lena Dunham’s Girls. Screen Education. No. 92, 16–21. McGill, Hannah. (2018). Girl Friends on Film: the rare case of lifelike female friendships on the big screen. BFI Online. Negra, Diane. (2009). What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism. New York: Routledge. Newland, Christina (ed). (2020). She Found it at the Movies: Women Writers on Sex, Desire and Cinema. Dorset: Red Press. Schreiber, Michele. (2014). American Postfeminist Cinema: women, romance and contemporary culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. (1986). The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Methue. Shoos, Diane. (1992). The Female Subject of Popular Culture. Hypatia. Vol. 7, No. 2, 215–226. Showalter, Elaine. (1993). On Hysterical Narrative. Narrative. Vol. 1, No. 1, 24–35. Tasker, Yvonne, and Diane Negra. (2007). Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Filmography Clueless. Directed by Amy Heckerling. USA: Paramount Pictures. 1995 Mystic Pizza. Directed by Donald Petrie. USA: Samuel Goldwyn Company. 1988 Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: The Weinstein Company. 2008

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About the Author Lauren Stephenson is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Media Studies at York St. John University. Her area of interest is the horror film, with current research projects concerning British horror TV, the New Zealand horror film, and the politics of portraying female friendship in the American cinema.

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‘A Particularly Cruel Business for a Woman’ Nineteenth-Century Opera as Feminist Voice in Match Point Christopher Booth

Abstract Through a close reading of Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005), this chapter describes pre-existing music’s unique ability to manipulate film. Unlike the traditional film score, pre-existing music can bring to bear social, cultural, economic and/or political associations stemming from its various origins. As the use of pre-existing music in film has increased in recent years, exploration of its additive element can provide comprehensive and holistic interpretations of a given film or scene. While on the surface, the film questions socially grounded notions of divine justice, its quasi-Romantic narration criticizes normative tropes of masculinity in popular culture. Keywords: opera, feminism, art

There’s murder but it’s used philosophically and not as a whodunit. I was trying to give a little substance to the story, so it wasn’t just a genre piece. ‒ Woody Allen 1 Art, for Allen, represents the ultimate attempt of humans to overcome mortality. ‒ Roumiana Deltcheva 2

Cinema scholar Ewa Mazierska describes how Woody Allen’s 2005 Match Point deals with the effect of luck on human behaviour and the way society 1 2

Quoted in Lax, 24. Deltcheva, 52.

Hall, Martin R. (ed.), Women in the Work of Woody Allen. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463722926_ch05

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should be organized to minimize the harm that people inflict on each other when pursuing selfish desires and needs. She writes that: [Allen] offers complex answers to these questions, allowing different arguments to be presented and discussed. However, it is worth adding that his moral discourse, although polyphonic, is at the same time somehow limited because it is transmitted by the stories of male characters who test their moral qualities in relations with women. [Allen’s] positioning of men and women is meaningful, as it conveys the traditional, misogynist idea that men are moral agents, whilst women are purely the objects of their actions without agency of their own. (2011: 6)

In a Paris Review essay titled ‘What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men’, Claire Dederer writes, ‘Men want to know why Woody Allen makes us so mad. Woody Allen slept with Soon-Yi Previn, the child of his life partner Mia Farrow. Soon-Yi was a teenager in his care the first time they slept together, and he the most famous film director in the world.’ (2017). She continues: When I was young, I felt like Woody Allen. I intuited or believed he represented me on-screen. He was me. This is one of the peculiar aspects of his genius – this ability to stand in for the audience. The identification was exacerbated by the seeming powerlessness of his usual on-screen persona: skinny as a kid, short as a kid, confused by an uncaring, incomprehensible world […] Post-Soon-Yi, I saw him as a predator. (ibid.)

Dederer does not mention the allegations that Allen abused Dylan Farrow, though if true, the description seems even more appropriate. How can we come to terms with what Allen performs in his personal life and what he performs on screen? Might there be a disconnect between Allen’s treatment of women in person and his writing of women in film? Do his actions toward women cause him to fall into the same misogynist collection as Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein and others who use women to benefit their pecuniary and professional success? While female characters often appear in titular roles, could Allen’s treatment of women represent a focus on feminine concerns, femininity or even feminism? Perhaps the most interesting portrayal, at least in the films in which Allen also stars, is his 1979 Manhattan, a film in which Allen’s character, Isaac, carries on an affair with a high-school student Tracy (Mariel Hemingway). The striking nonchalance of this relationship gives rise to questions of moral

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deficiency but also foreshadows the narrative implications of Match Point, which questions a supposed alignment of actions and consequences. But Match Point takes such engagement further via dialogism of Dostoevsky works, a project Allen ostensibly began with Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and would later continue with Cassandra’s Dream (2007). Marat Grinberg calls this set of films Allen’s ‘moral trilogy’ or his ‘trilogy of good and evil’ (2014: 37). In this chapter, I argue that a close reading of Match Point that involves an explication of Allen’s choice of operatic source music can provide a unique commentary on the film’s moral questions as well as a distinct illustration of Allen’s treatment of women in narrative. I will initially consider the implications of opting for exclusively nineteenth-century opera as the soundtrack, seldom a choice for any auteur, though many use such music on occasion (e.g. Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Peckinpah). Many operatic works in the nineteenth century, and especially those Allen included in Match Point, depict harm to women as narrative subject, and musicologists and other scholars have described opera’s misogynistic tendencies in recent decades. At the same time, much nineteenth-century opera is imbued with musical Romanticism, a German post-Enlightenment ideology favoured by composers and other artists throughout Europe and the Americas. By relating both the Romanticism and misogynist leanings of Allen’s chosen pre-existing musical works for Match Point’s soundtrack, I will describe how these choices provide discursive elements that enrich the dialogue on Allen, morality and his treatment of women as film subject. For decades, classical Hollywood film and film music have depended upon heteropatriarchy’s notion of gender complementarity. Even industry jargon has, for decades, used the term ‘marrying’ to describe a properly assigned sound to a visual presentation. The term has engendered considerable inquiry by feminist film critics and film musicologists. Amy Lawrence writes that ‘in classical film, sound is conflated with the feminine. Sound itself, as a cinematic register, is “feminized”, assigned the role of the perpetually supportive “acoustic mirror” that reinforces the primacy of the image and of the male gaze’ (1991: 111). Musicologists and other scholars often discuss Allen’s use of pre-existing music in film, as his choices generally resonate beyond aesthetic complement. His use of music is unique among auteurs for several reasons. He plays the clarinet regularly, and several of his screenplays include musicians as characters. He was recently offered the opportunity to direct Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi at La Scala in Milan. More significantly, however, is his use of pre-existing music in film. What seems most noteworthy about Match Point

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is the use of opera. No other Allen film includes opera in such a significant way, though isolated examples may later appear such as Giancarlo’s desire to sing operatic arias in To Rome with Love (2012); virtually all of the music in Match Point is taken from nineteenth-century Italian and French opera. In some films, Allen opts for classical music when the subject matter is non-comical, though this is not the case for Manhattan. Like other Allen films, Manhattan includes light-hearted, Tin Pan Alley tunes by George Gershwin, as if to further emphasize the casual nonchalance of Isaac and Tracy’s unseemly affair.

Operatic Origins As this chapter relies heavily on Allen’s choice of opera as soundtrack, it will be helpful to describe some relevant features of nineteenth-century, Romantic opera. As we know, opera is not a musical style but rather a dramatic form that uses music as an articulating device. During the nineteenth century, opera was reinvigorated when fused with the burgeoning zeitgeist of Romanticism in Germany and England, only to be quickly followed by opera librettists and composers in Italy and France. Romanticism, which had by the middle of the century become a predominant force in literature, drama and music, provided a wealth of material for such operatic composers as Wagner, Verdi and Puccini. Romantics embraced such subjects as Sehnsucht, an expression of longing incapable of being relieved; Bildung, a sense of self-cultivation often attributed to primary characters in Romantic narratives; and a sense of alienation and cultural criticism, in which artists tend to see themselves as outsiders whose art reveals social and cultural problems. While all three elements I mention here are relevant to describing the significance of Romanticism in nineteenth-century opera and other arts, I would posit that alienation and cultural criticism act as something of a driving force for the others. Such criticism stems from a rejection of Enlightenment-based notions that the world is an intricate, ordered machine understandable by humans, and that attainable, workable sciences such as mathematics and logic alone are imbued in Nature. Romantics, following David Hume and Immanuel Kant, argue that experience and art are more important to the understanding of Nature and the world. In his 1748 treatise An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume argues that senses are more important than logical, a priori sources. In his Critiques (Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason] from 1781,

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Kritik der praktischen Vernunft [Critique of Practical Reason] from 1788, and Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of Judgment] from 1795), Kant argues that both logic and experience are necessary, as is empirical observation, since our senses cannot truly perceive everything in the world. In his discussions of transcendental idealism, Kant suggests that two ‘worlds’ exist, the phenomenon and noumenon. The phenomenon, Kant describes, is the world perceptible by senses, i.e. the world as we see, hear, smell, etc., while the noumenon is the world unknowable yet ideal, the true essence of existence, the Ding-an-sich (thing unto itself). Regarding the importance of the arts, Kant distinguishes ‘pleasant’ art from ‘fine’ art(s), noting that simple acts of decoration, etc. do not rise to the level of fine art. The latter, which Kant calls the art of genius, is ‘a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication’ (Schöne Kunst dagegen ist eine Vorstellungsart, die für sich selbst zweckmäßig ist, und obgleich ohne Zweck, dennoch die Kultur der Gemütskräfte zur geselligen Mitteilung befördert) (1922: § 44). Arthur Schopenhauer, following Kantian transcendental idealism, posits in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation) that the world we experience exists solely as representation (Vorstellung), which essentially mirrors Kant’s phenomenon. He then describes of the existence of the Will (Wille), an a priori completeness of the universe, unattainable by empirical knowledge or logic, similar to Kant’s noumenon, but is represented to humans as an inert driving force, an unconscious, indelible and aimless striving devoid of purpose or knowledge. Because of this driving force, the representation (perceivable world) is an ‘objectification’ of the Will. Schopenhauer claims that aesthetically significant experiences, or what Kant describes as fine art, briefly release humans from their incessant servitude to the Will, which Schopenhauer describes as suffering. While the culture the Romantics felt the need to criticize and correct via art was one of commerce, industry and capitalism, Romantics felt that the importance of channelling art and searching for beauty was so superior to these that they endeavoured in various projects toward aesthetic education. In The Triumpf of Romanticism, Morse Peckham writes: Pure, unadulterated alienation is an extremely difficult position, indeed one almost impossible to maintain for very long. Some psychological strategy is necessary to overcome the inability to act which is the manifestation of alienation or perhaps is alienation. The Romantic solution has always been cultural transcendence, the construction of a metaphysics or

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a way of making sense out of the world and the derivation of sets of values which have an antithetical and dialectical relation to the metaphysics and values of the existent culture. (1970: 243)

In this way, the Romantic is so idealistic that s/he becomes isolated, having perceived an element of discord between the self and social forces. As a result, the Romantic often relies upon his/her senses to seek truth(s) unavailable to the conformist, the non-artist or the non-Romantic. For this reason, Bildung became a prime signifier for the Romantic. Bildung, while difficult to define precisely, as it has no direct English translation, refers to the Hegelian notion of self-cultivation and selfactualization commonly embraced by German Romantic philosophers in the nineteenth century. In The Romantic Imperative, Frederick C. Beiser writes: The romantics regarded self-realization as the highest good in both its classical senses. Self-realization is the final end, because it does not derive its value as a means to some higher end, such as the common good or the state. Although the romantics stressed the importance of education for the state, they did not value it simply as a means to that end; on the contrary, they insisted that self-realization is an end in itself, and they argued that the state should promote the self-realization of each of its citizens. (2006: 91–92)

In this way, we may also define Bildung as a social-historical project, a striving towards autonomy and actively attained freedom, representing an individual’s placement in history and culture. Regardless, the notion of self-cultivation is at the core of Bildung, and early Romantics, even in disparate fields, embraced this project as a necessary component. One can find it mentioned in the study of Romantic philosophy, literature, art, music and drama. The Romantic artist, driven to isolation and self-cultivation by an unartistic and thus undeserving culture, finds himself/herself longing for connection beyond the self. This is not a physical urge but a spiritual one, which Beiser describes as ‘the longing to return to that golden age when we were at one with ourselves, others, and nature’ (2006: 104). Again, stemming from alienation by and criticism of culture, such a longing, or Sehnsucht, appears as both indelible and unappeasable; the desired past, that golden age, cannot be relived. Romantics, who were products of the Enlightenment, turned against it, having found Enlightenment thinking too restrictive for personal expression, subjectivity and aesthetic purity.

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Women and the Opera Nineteenth-century opera became a fertile ground for Romantics to explore such expression. Initially, Romantic operas emerged early in the century in Germany (e.g. Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischutz in 1821), but the tradition quickly spread outward, and the project was taken up by Meyerbeer, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini and others. While such composers (and their librettists) explored Romantic aesthetics and narratives in order to compel viewers, they also intensified what Catherine Clément describes as the victimization of women. In her seminal book Opera, or the Undoing of Women from 1988, Clément contends that such victimization, commonplace in operatic tradition by this time in its history, is seen in several ways but usually involves sexual humiliation and/or homicide. When women are killed in opera, it is seldom quick, and Clément addresses the patriarchal spectacle of misogyny as ritual sacrifice. The death of female characters in opera has been a part of its history since its onset. Among the first operas to be consistently performed is Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 L’Orfeo, which presents Orpheus’ reaction to the death of Euridice. Several subsequent composers have fashioned operas on this subject, including Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose late eighteenth-century version begins with Euridice’s death, thus making it a focal point, which ostensibly influenced the Romantics. While Puccini’s output is consistently demonstrative of the victimization of women, Joseph Kerman describes Verdi’s works as quite similar in his 2006 article ‘Verdi or the Undoing of Women’, clearly an extension of Clément’s work. He writes: The works of Giuseppe Verdi bulk large in the operatic canon, and it is therefore worth asking if and how Verdi’s output as a whole stands up under Clément’s indictment. On the one hand, Verdi is no Puccini, whose routine ill-treatment of his women is an embarrassment even to his admirers. On the other hand, Verdi is no Gluck, who scoured the corpus of Greek tragedy for heroines of sometimes suffocating nobility, survivors all – Alceste, Iphigenia in her two manifestations. Verdi had his bad patch: a whole clump of women come to grief because of sexual transgression, actual or perceived, in operas composed within a four-year period between 1849 and 1853: Lida in La battaglia di Legnano (1849), Luisa in Luisa Miller (1849), Lina in Stiffelio (1850), Gilda in Rigoletto (1851), Leonora in Il trovatore (1853) and Violetta in La traviata (1853). (2006: 22)

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The Verdi operas with arias that appear in Match Point – Macbeth (1847), Rigoletto (1851), Il trovatore (1853), La traviata (1853) and Otello (1887) – exhibit harm to women in various ways, though Macbeth and Otello are not in Kerman’s list. Many Romantic composers looked to Shakespeare as a narrative source, as they viewed the Bard’s works as ostensibly unadulterated by the commercial concerns of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment society. As the plot of Match Point involves a murder plot similar to those of Macbeth and Othello (as well as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov), Allen’s choice appears more direct than merely connotative; one may surmise that his use of pre-existing music here gestures beyond the score for aesthetic complement. Verdi’s sources for the other three operas were Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas fils and Antonio García Gutiérrez. In addition to works by Donizetti and Bizet, the entire soundtrack of operatic sources complements the narrative backdrop of the film.

The Foundations of the Film Match Point’s tagline reads: ‘Passion. Temptation. Obsession.’ Of his choice of opera in Match Point, Allen claims ‘there’s all this blood and intensity in the story, so I used opera […] the story is operatic; it deals with the kinds of things that opera is so often about: love and lust, passion and jealousy, betrayal and tragedy […] and, of course, the confluence of fate and luck.’ (quoted in Harvey 2007: 88). Like many operas, especially Romantic operas, Allen’s film is about men mistreating women in various ways. Match Point is the story of a young tennis instructor named Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who marries Chloe (Emily Mortimer), the daughter of a rich industrialist Alec Hewett (Brian Cox) and his wife Eleanor (Penelope Wilton). While on holiday at the Hewett’s country home, Chris begins an affair with Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), an aspiring actor engaged to Chris’s brother, Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode). Tom and Nola eventually separate. Months later, Chris encounters Nola at the Tate Modern, and their affair resumes. Nola becomes pregnant (or at least she claims to be pregnant), and Chris vaguely promises to leave his wife for her and their baby. He reneges, unwilling to face his wife Chloe and her father, who hired and promoted him during Chris and Chloe’s romance. Equally important is Chris’s unwillingness to give up the luxury to which he has become accustomed. Chris decides to kill Nola, leaving the appearance of a drug-related robbery, which also necessitates the murder of Nola’s elderly neighbour, Mrs. Eastby (Margaret Tyzack), whose jewellery he steals and throws into the Thames. When the

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police find a diary in which Nola had chronicled her affair with Chris, Chris confesses that that he was guilty of the affair but not the murder. He pleads with the chief investigator not to disturb the Hewetts with further inquiry. Chris’s lucky break occurs when Mrs. Eastby’s wedding ring, having randomly struck a railing when Chris attempted to discard it, appears in the pocket of a drug addict caught during a later burglary. As the film opens, Allen’s iconic Windsor-font opening credits are accompanied by a 1912 Enrico Caruso recording of Gaetano Donizetti’s ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ from the 1832 opera The Elixir of Love. The aria serves to bookend the film as well, appearing with the final voiceover and end credits. In the opera scene, Nemorino realizes that a love potion he bought appears to be working on Adina, with whom he is infatuated. Allen chooses the second verse of the aria, which musically reinforces ‘morir,’ an early Italian word meaning ‘to die.’ As Nemorino sings that he could die of pleasure making love to Adina, the filmic context is that of Liebestod, or love-death. We frequently associate Liebestod with Wagner operas from the latter nineteenth century such as Tristan und Isolde, but operatic convention had already laid this groundwork by the 1830s. Furthermore, Nemorino first learns of the love potion upon hearing Adina tell the story of Tristan and Isuelt, the Celtic legend upon which the Wagner opera is based, thus the story’s tragic love-death seems to appear as a covert presence in Donizetti’s opera, and by extension Allen’s Match Point. More importantly, the opening scene presents a narration in which we see a tennis ball bouncing across a court while Chris Wilton states (accompanied by Caruso singing ‘Una furtiva lagrima’): The man who said ‘I’d rather be lucky than good’ saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match, when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.

While initially, this voiceover appears merely emblematic of an existential question about the importance of luck, it serves as the genesis of Chris’s Bildungsroman, i.e. his formation of identity or coming of age. Kate Rowan Holland describes such a narration as it pertains to Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent (1875): Dostoevsky exploits the traditional structural parallelism of the Bildung of hero and reader, yet he extends and complicates it through his use of

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a first-person narrator, unusual for the Bildungsroman. Bypassing the traditional authoritative narrator, Dostoevsky has the hero himself narrate the story of his formation, and thus creates another level of Bildung in Arkady’s attempt to express himself in language. In doing so, he also opens up his own creative process, implicating both his hero and his readers in the problem of how to adapt his novel to be maximally open to the historical flux of Russian society of the middle 1870’s, and thus creating not only a new kind of novel, but also a new kind of reader. (2004: 70)

Chris’s Bildungsroman, appearing here at the onset, develops as Chris – and the viewer – better understands his Bildung and ultimate goal: like Judah (Martin Landau) in Crimes and Misdemeanors, Chris desires to instantiate Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the prototypical and superior individual able to rise above conventional views of good and evil. In this way the viewer, like the reader of The Adolescent as Holland describes, is invited to view the film as an exploration of Chris’s Bildung and to confront the importance of luck to and for him in the forthcoming narrative. Ultimately, as Nola becomes an inconvenience to his social climbing, Chris leaves Nola in his wake, having conveniently killed her to protect his reputation. Such a scenario is entirely at home in Romantic operatic tradition, even and perhaps most suitably in the operas Allen chose to complement Match Point. In both Verdi operas Rigoletto and Il Trovatore, the primary female character is tragically killed. The same is true for Verdi’s 1853 La Traviata, but the comparison to Match Point is yet stronger. Ultimately, La Traviata tells of the titular character (or ‘fallen woman’) named Violetta while it examines problems of sex in bourgeois society. Violetta is a ‘kept woman’ in Paris who falls in love with the less cosmopolitan Alfredo. Alfredo’s father, Germont, demands that Violetta leave him to protect their family reputation, as their provincial background is incongruous with her lifestyle. Violetta eventually dies of tuberculosis, having been lauded by Germont for her willingness to give Alfredo up for his family’s reputation. The aria ‘Una furtive lagrima’ also appears when Chris encounters Nola at the Tate Modern, and the aria’s function reveals its diegetic placement. Since the music begins the moment Chris spots Nola, ends when he bumps into Chloe, only to resume when he leaves Chloe to look for Nola, we understand the music as psycho-diegetic, that is, a sonic representation of Chris’s mind and his obsession with Nola, somewhat like a song stuck in his head that seemingly forces his actions. Furthermore, the Caruso recording itself belies Chris’s attempted cultural position: from humble Irish origins, Chris ingratiates himself to the Hewetts by claiming to love opera, but most of the

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opera tracks in the film come from early Caruso recordings, and these are either similarly psycho-diegetic or diegetic music Chris has on CD. Enrico Caruso famously engaged popular culture in part to dispel assumptions of opera as high art for the elite, which earned him the superlative ‘the world’s first blockbuster recording artist.’ (Joe 2013: 14). In the film, it seems reasonable that Chris’s access to opera began with the popular Caruso, while the Hewetts maintain more elite preferences from their box at Covent Garden. George Bizet’s aria ‘Mi par d’udir ancora’ similarly emphasizes passion and temptation as an underscore for Chris and Nola’s affair that follows. We initially hear it as Chris is waiting for Nola while she auditions for an acting role. This foreshadows the romantic, sexual scenes between them, in which the music returns, functioning as a leitmotif for their affair. The operatic choice moves beyond mere aesthetics, however, as the scene in Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers is sung by a man unable to resist the lure of a beautiful priestess, despite his assurance to his male friend that he would not pursue her. Through the opera love triangle, we interpret Chris’s temptation as one in which he acknowledges the social construct of Nola’s betrothal to Tom, but as Allen himself infamously said, ‘the heart wants what it wants’ (quoted in Bailey 2001: 224), referring to his own pursuit of Soon-Yi Previn. In Chris and Nola’s relationship, we see Allen’s authorship of Nola as the preyed-upon and seemingly powerless woman, perhaps the most frequent operatic trope. Equally noteworthy is the cultural tension between social climber Chris – along with the British, upper-class Hewett family – and Nola, the struggling American actor. Opera, for Chris and the Hewetts, represents European high art, while Nola’s Hollywood, television and advertising pursuits represent American pop culture. Tom, Chloe and Chris do attend a film screening, but they see Walter Salles’ 2004 The Motorcycle Diaries, a far cry from low-brow Hollywood fare. Nola does not attend, claiming to have a migraine. Her powerlessness to participate at the Hewett family’s cultural level is at home within operatic literature, which itself tends to relegate female characters as lacking in agency and restricted to the home. In fact, both Chris and Nola seem to struggle with this fish-out-of-water position next to the affluent and culturally distinguished Hewetts, but the family’s reaction to them could not be more different. While Alec and Eleanor Hewett admire Chris’s elevation from his humble beginnings, together with Alec offering Chris a high-paying job, Eleanor denigrates Nola’s attempts to succeed as an actor. After a failed audition, Eleanor asks: ‘How long do you keep it up […] time passes and nothing significant materializes, how long do you keep on going before you decide to try something else?’ When Tom intervenes to defend Nola, Eleanor doubles down, saying, ‘It’s only

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logical, Tom, especially for a woman. It’s a particularly cruel business for a woman. And as you get older and time passes, if nothing happens, it gets harder and harder.’ The unequal treatment of Chris and Nola by the Hewetts reveals their sexist view of the rising generation: Eleanor disparages Nola’s ambitions, while Alec rewards Chris for his fortitude. After Chris and Chloe begin their relationship, Chloe discusses Chris’s future with her parents. Eleanor comments that she ‘doesn’t understand what he’s aiming for’, and Chloe responds that ‘he doesn’t want to be a tennis pro for the rest of his life’. Alec interjects, saying, ‘I find him very likeable. He’s fought his way up the only way open to him. And he’s not trivial. I had a very interesting conversation with him the other day about Dostoevsky.’ Chloe then encourages Alec to hire Chris, which he does. Nola, like Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata, functions as a sex symbol for both affluent and humble suitors. After she reveals her pregnancy to Chris, he encourages her to get an abortion, but she refuses, claiming that she already did that for Tom. While both men desire her for sex, neither seems interested in supporting her or staying with her long-term. Tom tells Chris that he called off his engagement to Nola in part because Eleanor ‘poisoned the well on that one’. Perhaps only to secure his financial progress, Chris marries Chloe, whom he claims to love, but he continues his affair with Nola despite his conspicuous apprehension about getting caught. When the police interview Chris about Mrs. Eastby’s murder, he acknowledges his affair with Nola but says, ‘God, I beg you, don’t go on a fishing expedition over this and wreck people’s lives. My family, my marriage is at stake.’ While Nola is perhaps as much a hustler and social climber as Chris, we are constantly reminded of her secondary status. We first see her in the Hewetts’ rec room, where her ping-pong playing reminds us that the Hewetts embrace the male tennis pro and belittle the female actor. Furthermore, the film’s Dostoevskian opening narration, which established Chris’s Bildungsroman, gestures towards his primacy in the narrative as opposed to Nola’s subjugation. Nola’s ancillary role is signalled by her similarity to Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto. Like Nola, Gilda is involved with a wealthy suitor (the Duke of Mantua), only to be cast aside for another. The appearance of the aria ‘Gualtier Maldè […] Caro nome’ acts as a harbinger for Nola’s death. Immediately after Chris and Nola begin their affair (which occurs without music), we see Chris daydreaming in a business class, and the music begins. The scene cuts to a performance of Rigoletto attended by Chris, Chloe, Nola and Tom. We see Chris fully in the frame, with Chloe on the right side as she moves closer to Chris, as if to be seen more fully and

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thus more important. The camera then moves towards Nola, bypassing Chloe. Such a fast shift indicates how Chris’s thoughts, emboldened by Verdi’s music, are entirely about his new love interest. The aria, sung by Gilda, expresses her newfound love for a student named Gualtier Maldè, whom she does not realize is the Duke. In their respective narratives, both Gilda and Nola are out of place culturally, and the camera’s position on Nola, coupled with Gilda’s aria, anticipates her ultimate demise. In the opera, Gilda allows herself to be killed to protect the Duke, her lover. While La Traviata involved the issue of family reputation, we also see a subtle gender reversal involving Chloe in a diegetic performance of the opera at Covent Garden. While Alfredo and Violetta sing their duet ‘Un dì felice, eterea’, we understand the attraction between the opera characters to mimic that of Chloe and Chris. In the aria, Alfredo claims that he loved Violetta from the first time he saw her; in the film, we see Chloe behaving similarly toward Chris. Verdi’s 1853 opera is based on the 1848 novel The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils, a prime example of French Realism in literature, and both opera and novel focus on social problems of sex and class in bourgeois society. By channelling the proto-feminist placement of Marguerite in the novel, the counterpart to the opera’s Violetta, Allen’s inclusion of Verdi’s scene, and especially through the gender reversal of Chloe’s pursuit of Chris, gestures towards a third-wave feminist outlook that challenges normative operatic, literary and filmic gender assignments. This interpretation works to undermine Germont’s concern about family reputation: his old-world perspective regarding his would-be daughter-inlaw’s sexual activities. The climactic murder scene, ‘Era la notte’, in Verdi’s Otello evokes death while providing a similar gender reversal. It is important to note here that one should not necessarily read Verdi’s music as typical cinematic accompaniment but rather a dramatic dialogue that functions in tandem with the otherwise textually limited scene. As score, Verdi’s music seems out of place. The duet occurs in the opera when Iago convinces Otello that Desdemona is unfaithful. On one level, the film mimics the opera, as both Desdemona and Nola are killed by the men they love. More sublime, however, is the duet’s covert message, which speaks for Nola at the point of her death. The only unfaithful character in Match Point is Chris, and only Nola knows this. In this way, Otello’s part, though sung by a tenor, represents Nola’s disembodied voice, accusing Chris of betraying not only Chloe but Nola herself. After Chris had promised to leave Chloe, he lures Nola to the apartment by implying he has already done so. Nola never knows of his betrayal, or only briefly as she dies – only Verdi’s duet speaks her accusation. Otello sings of his intent to

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kill Desdemona’s alleged lover at the very moment that Chris murders Nola. When he escapes the crime scene, Otello sings ‘Ah, sangue, sangue, sangue’ as a sonic indicator of the brutal act, since no blood is shown on-screen. Provided with this interpretation, we can look back at Donizetti’s ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ in a similar way. Though it drives Chris to pursue Nola romantically, in the end, it represents her. The aria’s final line, ‘Si può morire, si può morir d’amor’ (‘Yes I could die, yes I could die of love’), on one level represents Chris’s indefatigable passion but in a more direct way describes Nola’s fate: Chris’s love for her eventually brings about her death.

The Feminist Voice If several arias in the film represent Nola’s disembodied feminist voice, does this subvert the intent of the film? Here I would argue that it does not, if its intent is to overcome patriarchal hegemony. As a social critique, however, might Nola’s operatic voice foreshadow such feminist appropriations as the hashtag ‘nevertheless she persisted’, Mitch McConnell’s infamous 2017 claim that his colleague Elizabeth Warren should have known when to stop talking (Wang: 2017)? Were it not for the Verdi duet, the film could be seen to extol Chris Wilton’s success. With Verdi’s duet, Allen’s film reminds us that in the current state, Nola’s claims are ultimately perceived as unimportant. Might we consider this a feminist stance in and of itself? We could, but if we follow Dederer, this is difficult to do post-Soon-Yi. This seems as difficult as believing then-US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 claim, ‘I cherish women. I want to help women. I’m going to be able to do things for women that no other candidate would be able to do’ in response to his 2005 hot-mic statement ‘I moved on her like a bitch’, in which he openly brags of sexual assault. Still, when we celebrate what Dederer calls ‘monstrous men’ even to the point of lauding contemptible actions, we must consider what to do with the art of so-called monstrous men as well. Near the end of Match Point, Nola and Mrs. Eastby’s quasi-ghosts appear to Chris, who responds to their complaints by saying ‘the innocent are sometimes slain to make way for a grander scheme’. Chris’s grander scheme – to solidify his newfound upper-class position – reveals his intentional use of opera as a social climbing device, but all the while the covert psycho-diegetic and proto-feminist implications of nineteenth-century operatic sources are as lost on him as his beloved Dostoevsky. Chris Wilton’s Crime and Punishment counterpart, Rodion Raskolnikov, also guilty of two murders,

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confesses to a moral prostitute, not unlike Verdi’s Violetta. We see Chris reading Crime and Punishment, which he uses to ingratiate himself to his father-in-law, Alec, though Chris seems to gloss over Raskolnikov’s moral conundrum. Could Nola and Mrs. Eastby’s posthumous complaints in Match Point present an attempt at divulging authorial guilt or even offer a subtle male apology for the fact that even men who professionally respect women privately falter? This is possible, as the social position of opera, generally demonstrative of modes of civility and bourgeois decorum, seems to have been reversed: opera as dramatic discourse in Match Point demonstrates its more sinister potential – to point out social evils that objectify and consume femininity. This fatalistic interpretation goes hand in hand with both Romanticism and Allen’s penchant for Dostoevskian subjects. Allen says: I do appreciate the Russian milieu and when I shot Love and Death I found the Russians interesting because they were close to the subject I love. At the period in which the film was set, Russian intellectuals knew Romanticism and had an obsession with death, immortality, religion. (quoted in Benayoun 1986: 157)

Allen’s statement here begs the question of whether he acknowledges the similarities between Romantic works demonstrative of harm towards women and the similar practice in many of his own f ilms. Moreover, we must consider the mimetic position of these films vis-à-vis Allen’s life. Colleen Glenn contends that: the widespread confusion between the public and private Allen is well founded – not only because Allen dresses the same onscreen and off, but also because his fictional narratives contain so many autobiographical elements that it becomes difficult to sort out the real Allen from the fictional one […] despite the distinction Allen would wish to draw between himself and his characters, these lines, out of context, could easily be mistaken as screenplay material from Stardust Memories (1980), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), or any number of movies in which Allen has starred as a neurotic, self-doubting artist. (2013: 41)

When confronted with the notion that some of his films present autobiographical elements, Allen tends to reject this claim, offering such explanations as ‘my movies have been very self-expressive; that’s mistaken for

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autobiography. They’re expressive of observations of mine or feelings of mine, but what you’re seeing on the screen much more often than not are total fabrications, but those fabrications are in the service of my feelings’ (quoted in Lax 2007: 311). Brandon Fibbs writes, ‘Match Point is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment – without the punishment’, and it seems that opera intensifies this assessment (2005). In the novel, Raskolnikov believes that ordinary people are held to a standard that is simply unnecessary for extraordinary people, or great men. Chris Wilton, Raskolnikov’s filmic equivalent brags rather directly, like Donald Trump, that his own greatness offsets any moral responsibilities. In some ways, Match Point dissents. While my claim that certain opera sources speak for Nola and other mistreated female characters may be debatable, the dramatic polyphony in the murder scene repudiates societal endorsement of Chris’s behaviour. Though its author appears predatory to women, if Match Point tells us anything, it is that we are approaching a point at which we not only reward men like Chris Wilton, Woody Allen or even Donald Trump for their crimes, we no longer perceive such actions as crimes at all. In a world of #metoo and #timesup, men especially need to come to grips with what it means that some artists we may love are, in fact, sexual predators whose misdeeds we have known about for some time. In the midst of these discussions, I want to make an odd argument: attending to the opera sources Allen uses, Match Point can help us press into these issues in a constructive way. Opera carries centuries of misogynistic baggage, and yet audiences still respond positively. While mainstream cinema seems to have charted a similar course of white male hetero privilege, films like Match Point, which channel opera in a knowing way, at least provide us with a means to consider how art, artist and author reflect social incongruities.

Bibliography Bailey, Peter J. (2001). The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Beiser, Frederick C. (2006) The Romantic Imperative: The concept of early German Romanticism. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Benayoun, Robert. (1986). The Films of Woody Allen, trans. Alexander Walker. New York: Harmony. Clément, Catherine. (1988). Opera, or the Undoing of Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Dederer, Claire. (2017). What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? The Paris Review, November 20. Deltcheva, Roumiana. (1999). The Russian Cultural Presence in the Works of Woody Allen. PhD diss., University of Alberta. Donizetti, Gaetano. (1832). L’elisir d’amore. Felice Romani, librettist. Milan. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. (1970). The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Andrew MacAndrew. New York: Bantam. —. (1971). The Adolescent, trans. Andrew MacAndrew. New York: Norton and Co. —. (1992). Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Knopf. Fibbs, Brandon. (2017). Match Point, film review. BrandonFibbs.com, 2005, accessed December 20. Dumas fils, Alexandre. (1986). La Dame aux Camélias, trans. David Coward. New York: Oxford University. Glenn, Colleen. (2013). Which Woody Allen? In Peter J. Bailey, Sam B. Girgus (Eds.), A Companion to Woody Allen. Somerset: John Wiley & Sons. Grinberg, Marat. (2014). The Birth of a Hebrew Tragedy: Cassandra’s Dream as a Morality Play in the Context of Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. In Vincent Brook and Marat Grinberg (Eds.), Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen. Waltham, MA: Brandeis, pp. 37–57. Harvey, Adam. (2007). The Soundtracks of Woody Allen: A Complete Guide to the Songs and Music in Every Film, 1969–2005. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, Inc. Holland, Kate Roman. (2004). The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: A Genre Study of Dostoevsky’s Works 1873–1881. PhD diss., Yale University. Hume, David, and P.F. Millican. (2007). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joe, Jeongwon. (2013). Opera as Soundtrack. London: Routlege. Kant, Immanuel and Karl Vorländer. (1922). Kritik der Urteilskraft. Leipzig: F. Meiner. Kerman, Joseph. (2006). Verdi or the Undoing of Women. Cambridge Opera Journal 18, 21–31. Lawrence, Amy. (1991). Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lax, Eric. (2007). Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New York: Knopf. Mazeriska, Ewa. (2011). Moral Luck in the Films of Woody Allen. Kinema (Fall 2011): 1–18. Pally, Marcia, et al. (1998). Deconstructing Woody: A Critical Symposium on Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry. Cinéaste, 23, no. 3, 32–38. Schopenhauer, Arthur. (1859). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus.

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Verdi, Giuseppi. (1847). Macbeth. Francesco Maria Piave, librettist. Florence. —. (1849). La battaglia di Legnano. Salvadore Cammarano, librettist. Rome. —. (1849). Luisa Miller. Salvadore Cammarano, librettist. Naples. —. (1851). Rigoletto. Francesco Maria Piave, librettist. Venice. —. (1853). Il trovatore. Salvadore Cammarano, librettist. Rome. —. (1853). La traviata. Francesco Maria Piave, librettist. Venice. —. (1887). Otello. Arrigo Boito, librettist. Milan. Wagner, Richard. (1865). Tristan und Isolde. Richard Wagner, librettist. Munich. Wang, Amy B. (2017). ‘Nevertheless, she persisted’ becomes new battle cry after McConnell silences Elizabeth Warren. The Washington Post, February 8. Weber, Carl Maria von. (1821). Der Freischütz. Friedrich Kind, librettist. Berlin.

Filmography Cassandra’s Dream. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: The Weinstein Company. 2007 Crimes and Misdemeanors. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Orion Pictures. 1989 Love and Death. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1975 Manhattan. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1979 Match Point. Directed by Woody Allen. UK: DreamWorks Pictures. 2005 To Rome with Love. Directed by Woody Allen. Italy: Sony Pictures Classics. 2012 The Motorcycle Diaries. Directed by Walter Salles. Argentina: Buena Vista. 2004

About the Author Christopher Booth completed a PhD in musicology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC in 2018, with a dissertation titled ‘Preexisting Music as Disruptive Element in Historical Fiction Film’. His primary research interests are music in cinema, opera, intertextuality and semiotics. He currently teaches music history and music theory at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

Part 3 Intertextuality

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I Gotta Be Me The Remade Woman and Replaying the Woman’s Part in Woody Allen’s Movies Michael Newton Abstract This chapter examines Allen’s staging of female identity and the relations between men and women by remaking comedies that impressed and influenced him in his youth. The work explores how Tracy Ullmann’s character in Small Time Crooks (2000) replays Judy Holliday’s Billie Dawn in George Cukor’s Born Yesterday (1950), how To Rome With Love (2012) restages Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik (Lo sceicco bianco) (1952), and how the underrated Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) revisits the ambience of the Bob Hope and Madeleine Carroll pairing in My Favorite Blonde (1942). The chapter explores the ways in which Allen’s twenty-first-century take on the woman’s experience and his understanding of femininity are deeply rooted in the cinematic past. Keywords: remake, intertextuality, European cinema

This chapter investigates how Woody Allen used old films to portray new relations between the sexes. It begins this exploration of the rehearsal of past movie tropes in Allen’s work with a consideration of Play It Again, Sam (1972), the movie that first posed the question of repetition that pervades so many Woody Allen movies. It then goes on to investigate three clusters of films in which Woody Allen consciously stages female identity by remaking stories that impressed and influenced him while growing up in New York. In Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), Allen traces the relation between men and women by drawing on the ambience of the Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour or Rhonda Fleming pairings in such films as My Favorite Blonde (1942) or The Great Lover (1949).

Hall, Martin R. (ed.), Women in the Work of Woody Allen. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463722926_ch06

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The chapter then turns to how Tracy Ullmann’s character in Small Time Crooks (2000) replays Judy Holliday’s Billie Dawn in George Cukor’s Born Yesterday (1950). Finally, the essay unpacks the ways in which Allen has restaged Fellini’s movies, and therefore his women, exploring Sweet and Lowdown’s (1999) mirroring of La Strada (1954), and To Rome With Love’s (2012) re-enactment of The White Sheik (Lo sceicco bianco, 1952). In this way, this chapter focuses on repetition and re-casting as something intrinsic to Allen’s work and to Allen’s women. More vitally, it will explore the ways in which Allen’s take on woman’s experience and his understanding of femininity are deeply rooted in the cinematic past and were essentially formed through his immersion in 1940s and early 1950s cinematic comedy. The chapter traces a pattern in which Allen understands and frames contemporary gender relations through comparisons with the movies that were his education. Over the last 50 years, Woody Allen has perfected the art of the reprise, as he has consciously drawn on and remodelled the films that most impressed him in childhood and adolescence. In the process, he has not so much created pastiches of the cinema classics of his youth as formed re-embodiments of them. To quote Katherine Fusco, he has established a ‘cinema of citation’, where the audience finds itself spotting resemblances and tracing motifs already familiar (2013). Allen is a self-referential filmmaker; remaking those old films, he has also constantly remade himself. Claire Sisco King contends that Woody Allen simultaneously borrows from his best source – that is, himself – and reworks in later films themes and motifs that he had explored in earlier films (2013). This has meant that he has sometimes made copies of copies, returning over and over to themes mapped out both in his movies and in the films that inspired those movies. This indebtedness to the cinema of the past determines much of how his movies frame their women characters. In the process of the revivification of long-standing plots and long-dead personae, both Allen’s films and the identity of the women within them exist as echoes, dependent on a voice from elsewhere. It is precisely the relation between being bound by preexisting conventions and being free to act as yourself now that frames the stories in which Allen’s women find themselves. He first comes up with female characters who recapitulate other filmmaker’s creations. And then, with astonishing frequency, many of Allen’s films go on to signal the release of the woman from constraints of dependence through the possibility of an affair – though in pursuing those amorous possibilities, the women still show themselves to be characters confined by their sources, going through

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the motions allowed to the women in Fellini’s films or Cukor’s films or in a Bob Hope movie. In the end, in Allen’s version of things, his women remain ‘faithful’, returning to the relationship – the marriage – that first defined them, often returning (like Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery or Tracy Ullman in Small Time Crooks) to Allen himself. Christopher Ames has argued that Allen’s immersion in his relation to earlier films has shown ‘how the constraints and expectations of film genres undermine artistic authenticity’ (2013: 207). I would argue instead that his films dramatize a tension between the following of conventional paths and the possibility of finding your own voice, your own agency – though precisely through the limitations on freedom that come with re-using someone else’s plot, inhabiting the generic conventions, or living in the loving bonds of marriage. The past constricts you, putting you in a pattern before you begin, but it also proffers us a style that’s still available for us to live by.

Allen Plays Bogart One question at stake in Play It Again, Sam is to what extent the attitudes and mores of the recent past can still be seen to pertain to the present world. Here, the discrepancy (or the harmony) between the implicit ideologies of 1940s noir and the dating world of the early 1970s is one of Allen’s comic points. Several reviewers pointed out that Bogart’s romantic advice was old-fashioned and indeed criminal: in a review in The Morning Star (1972), Virginia Dignam noted that progressive women are going to balk at Bogart’s rough-house advice, remarking that ‘Herbert Ross directs this comedy, which perpetuates the myths of a sexist society with imagination, control and skill’. In The Times, Stephen Frears further suggested that following Bogart’s urgings would leave Allen’s hero facing a charge of rape. Alexander Walker argued convincingly that: ‘What the film does is combine two cinema genres – the male chauvinist appeal of “Bogey”, who slaps a woman back, and the male helplessness appeal of Woody who needs to be guided to the target’ (1972). The larger point may be that the same values imbue both these forms of masculinity – the vision of women proves remarkably consistent across them. Regarding this clinging to an outmoded past, Dilys Powell noted that the film portrayed a protagonist with an interior life fashioned from cinema. It is a paradox that the movie portrays a self constructed from quotes and allusions, and yet Woody Allen’s presence here acts as a sign of uniqueness, a persona instantly recognizable, marketed, reproduced and vivid, and powerfully imposed on his films – in the manner of the movies of those

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earlier comics who had so impressed him: Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, W.C. Fields. In the same sense (and despite the fact that Herbert Ross directs it), this is one of the first examples of what can only be seen, generically speaking, as a ‘Woody Allen film’. In 1972, that was already clear: in a review, David Robinson declared: ‘His personality quite firmly dominates the film; and it is a very completely realised personality at that’; in the Daily Mirror, Arthur Thirkell concurred: ‘But it is Woody Allen’s film’. Play It Again, Sam is, of course, nonetheless a movie that lives through its relation to other movies, with Allen playing a film critic, someone caught up in his relation to the cinema of the past. Allan Felix’s wife Nancy condemns him as ‘one of life’s great watchers’, someone whose relation to the world is filtered through a cinema screen. Here in the film itself, one film literally includes another, with Casablanca’s ending doubling with the beginning of Play It Again, Sam. We in the cinema audience watch Woody in the cinema audience mouthing the words on screen, karaoke-style, a man in a film desperate to be a man in another film. In Play It Again, Sam, what is actually at issue in these revisitings of the past is not the options available to ‘women’ as such but rather the frail position of men and of masculinity. Regarding Allen’s drawing on 1930s, 1940s and 1950s films, the women thereby exist in relation purely to male fantasies. In Play It Again, Sam, the film itself sends up that propensity in the hero to fantasize about women, mocking his misapprehensions regarding them. The film’s commitment to portraying unconscious impulses and fugitive desires/fears extends into the uncomfortable discussion of rape fantasies between Linda and Allan. The hero’s relation to cinema here becomes a mirror to our entanglement in wishes, anxieties and compulsions; film itself is a dream space, here invading the otherwise broadly realist world of the movie, bringing figures who have no legitimate place in this world onto the stage and the screen. Allan is a man caught between the encouraging cinematic vision of Bogart and the punishing, illusory ghost of his divorced wife. Newspaper critics worried over the convincingness of Jerry Lacy’s impersonation of Bogey, particularly as the film also constantly quotes the actual Bogart himself, appearing in clips throughout (see Malcolm 1972). And yet the discrepancy between the actual man and the impersonator is the point – a simulacrum of a simulacrum. For Bogart himself stands as an invented persona, a ‘star’ performed by a working actor – and yet also the man himself, a person within the persona. Allan wants to catch Bogart in The Big Sleep, but Linda is keen to see Ida Lupino in They Drive By Night (1940), where Lupino’s character murders her husband so she can pursue her love for his best friend. It’s clear that, for both of them, these movies represent dream versions of unconscious impulses or

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of fantasized images of the self. As Philip Marlowe, Bogart is both desirable and beyond desire, a ‘shop-soiled Sir Galahad’ nobly evading a long-term entanglement with Lauren Bacall. In this web of allusions and influences within which the characters try to ‘be themselves’, the move towards autonomy proves identical to a yearning towards adultery. Here Linda’s free act, her adultery, means finding herself freely reproducing the finale of Casablanca. At the end of the film, a moral gesture finds itself both in its true virtue but also as an echo of Bogart’s renunciation at the close of Casablanca. Allan gets to pretend that he’s Bogart and therefore the one who forces noble self-renunciation on Linda, but in actual fact she’s already chosen her husband over her friend. Still, he can finally play that part. It is hard to suppress the thought that Allan (Allen) never wanted a relationship anyway; what he really wanted was to be Humphrey Bogart renouncing a relationship. If Allen as Allan becomes Bogart, Keaton as Linda becomes Ingrid Bergman. And yet this transformation is not her own choice. She’d rather, presumably, be Ida Lupino. She’s simply caught up in Allan’s dream, cast in a role despite herself, not recognizing the dialogue that places her until Allan explains it for her. It is not her agency that is at stake – even though giving up on each other and choosing the marriage instead is in fact her call. The payoff of Play It Again, Sam is that, rather than having to live his life as an imaginary Bogart’s pupil, Allan is short enough and ugly enough to live it as himself. The ultimate freedom from the dependence, from the sad fact of being an epigone who must succeed a more glamorous generation, comes in the realization – enacted in so many Allen films from Play It Again, Sam to Midnight in Paris (2011) and onwards – that you must live your own life, here and now, and not be the echo, the imitating latecomer that your own relation to popular culture might make of you. This is a classical comedy of self-misunderstanding, of attempting to be what you are not, thereby creating bathos and failure, before accepting a truer and less self-deceived version of your own identity. In George Meredith’s understanding of comedy, this arises from the loving correction brought about in the relation to the man or woman whom you desire (1877: 78). Here, intriguingly, that correction comes not from Linda but from Allan’s own insight.

Allen Has Hope Allen borrows from Bogart in Play It Again, Sam; he borrows from Bob Hope in practically all his comic movies. As he put it in his autobiography, ‘It’s

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hard to exaggerate what Bob Hope meant to me’ (2020: 67). In the 1940s and early 1950s, the questioning of expectations around gender roles was perhaps unexpectedly central to Bob Hope’s screen persona and thereby to the plots of the movies in which he appeared. With regards to how Allen would treat the women characters in his films, and more particularly how he would frame the man’s position in relation to them, he could learn surprising lessons from Hope. Allen takes from Hope both a way of framing himself as a character and also a structuring trope derived from the presence of such a character in his films: the nebbish, the weak ‘unmanly’ man stands against, and in relation to, the man of violence, the tough guy. Hope’s persona often necessarily required a foil in this way, another version of masculinity by which he might define himself. In My Favorite Brunette (1947), the entire plot is a tale that Hope’s character tells, inhabiting the hardboiled narrator’s role, the voiceover so central to 1940s noir. Here he takes on the detective role due to a misprision, being mistaken for another. Hope feels he can easily become a detective; he already owns a trench coat after all. The film takes on the paradoxes of parody, sending up the plots and motifs that it enacts and celebrating what it mocks. It is not just a parody of noir, it is noir. In adopting the hardboiled persona, Hope also taps into a version of masculinity, tough and beyond feeling, that his miscasting in the role disrupts. His muscles, it turns out, are just ‘like a woman’s’ – after being slapped, he treats one of the gangsters like a woman who’s accused him of being ‘fresh’. Hope plays a baby-photographer by profession, photographing subjects who are essentially natural and unselfconscious, even as he –unconvincingly, self-consciously – pretends that he possesses a masculinity that he cannot attain – in part because it too is only a style, an image, an ‘act’. In these ways, My Favorite Brunette is effectively a dry run for Play It Again, Sam and Manhattan Murder Mystery. ‘All my life I wanted to be a hard-boiled detective, like Humphrey Bogart, or Dick Powell, or even Alan Ladd’, Hope’s character complains to Alan Ladd. Here Ladd plays Ladd and is caught reading Mystery magazine, showing himself to be just another purchaser of Chandleresque dreams. Undoubtedly, Allen draws both on Hope’s persona and on the ambiguities regarding gender roles that thread through his f ilms. In Allen’s lighter comedies, those that most clearly are inspired by Bob Hope, it is the case that these women live in relation to men, and the men in relation to women. Allen does portray solitary women but very rarely solitary men. Even then the solitude frames itself in relation to the women to whom it denies access. Manhattan Murder Mystery in particular is a film that comes after Bob

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Hope. At the very start of the film, back from the ice hockey game, Larry Lipton (Woody Allen) is excited to stretch out in bed and to watch a Bob Hope film on television. The movie showcases Allen’s lightness, a touch that characterizes the way in which his comic films treat women. The movie draws on the knowing urbane sweetness of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood films, that sense of human quirkiness. As in Play It Again, Sam, in Manhattan Murder Mystery the same dilemma returns: do you live, or do you watch films? Here, in this movie where the villain runs a cinema, Allen suggests that living is watching films, and then enacting what’s in them in real life. It’s Carol Lipton (Diane Keaton), a person enthralled by stories of a cannibalistic serial killer, who pushes for life, and her husband who is content merely to look on. In Manhattan Murder Mystery, movies imbue this movie. In this fraught Manhattan apartment house, the Liptons’ relation to the older neighbours recalls Rosemary’s Baby (in a reversal, the Liptons even bring the ‘widower’ chocolate mousse, echoing Minnie’s drugged gift to Rosemary, with its ‘chalky undertaste’). Carol seeing the dead wife resurrects shades of The Third Man, another back-from-the-dead story. In the course of the film, they all go to see Double Indemnity (another recurring point of reference in Allen’s immersion in 1940s film); Larry Lipton’s love rival, Ted (Alan Alda), imagines that his position in Carol’s restaurant will be in the front like Rick in Casablanca (clearly recalling the Bogart fantasy in Play It Again, Sam). Carol’s greater lust for life counterpoints Larry’s wimpish reluctance ever to get involved. Larry ‘commands’ his wife to sleep, struggling ineffectually to be an authority, even as the film prefers equality (even in the pursuit of mild flirtations and affairs). ‘I forbid you to go!’ Larry pointlessly cries, even as she does in fact go anyway. In the empty-nest moment that the film posits, with their son off at university, it’s Carol who makes a bid for renewal. What’s vital here is that by channelling Bob Hope, and the style of the Hope movies, the women in Allen’s films are allowed more agency and energy. As Larry, Allen himself adopts the position of the unheroic one, cowardly, tentative, hesitant before life, and insecure in having to adopt the roles allotted to men in American Hollywood culture. Conversely, Carol is liberated, impressing direction on the film, choosing adventure. It is true that in the end, Larry discovers his inner heroism, freeing the kidnapped Carol, who’s been reduced for the moment to the position of a damsel in distress. But meanwhile female agency moves across to the spurned lover (and secretary) of the wife-killer, Mrs. Dalton (Marge Redmond), who takes matters into her own hands and shoots down her wayward man in a homicidal display of feminine power. Keaton

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may also be sidelined by the more exotic and forthright Marcia (Anjelica Huston), and – as is customary in Allen’s films – Keaton’s character’s bid for life ends in a return to her marriage. Flirtation with the possibility of adultery (for Carol with Ted, and with Larry with Marcia) fizzles out, leaving this married couple once more, but more sweetly, together. And yet the adventure has brought life back to marriage, making it a choice again and not just the habit it had become. Set in 1940, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion takes its meanings both from its relation to Hope and to early 1940s noir. Its debt to Double Indemnity is clear with its borrowing of an insurance man as detective, a guy with an ulcer who won’t let go. With no specific movie in mind, nonetheless the spirit of Hope’s movies guides Allen’s film. The film is a fantasy on every level – in its interest in hypnosis and mesmerism and also as a version of the 1940s. It draws on what Allen takes as the sophistication of the period, exemplified not merely by the shambolic Hope but more smoothly by the comedies of Ernest Lubitsch – and George Cukor too. That formality inscribes a dreamt-up version of the relations between men and women, their disputes sublimated into banter and witty put-downs, their reconciliations brought about by the improbable twists and turns of plot. Allen’s character, C.W. Briggs, is an ageing lech troubled and displaced by a woman co-worker, his fragile masculinity put on edge by her success, daunted as he is by women with a high IQ. As so often happened in 1980s and 1990s film with regards to the successful working woman, Helen Hunt’s character, Betty Ann Fitzgerald, stands here as a humourless killjoy, driven by efficiency and yet also sleeping her way to the top through a relationship with her boss. However, dressing Hunt, the costume designer, Suzanne McCabe deliberately combined ‘a tailored professional look’ with something more softly feminine – a combination of attitudes central to how the film wants us to understand her (Curse publicity materials: 12). Nonetheless, at first, at least, the film posits a conflict between ‘science’ and ‘intuition’, with all the ‘intuition’ belonging to the man. Fitzgerald (Hunt) may not have intuition, but she does possess a subconscious mind, as does Briggs himself – their defence mechanisms undermined by the hypnotic trances that reveal the hidden self. Apparently automatically, at the film’s end, Fitzgerald chooses Briggs in a trance, giving herself to the impulses that her conscious self would deny. In fact, as things turn out, this surrender to love is her conscious choice, an act of will and a sign of agency, as she fakes being hypnotized. The characters’ immersion in the world of the 1940s is another kind of trance, a way in which the film imagines them as caught up in the behaviour,

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the tropes and the implicit cultural ideologies of 1940s movies. In that long-gone culture, they still find room for the true embedded self. Briggs is already a figure who is out of time, a ‘dinosaur’ in the modern world of distant 1940 who nonetheless achieves a rapprochement, temporarily suspending hostilities between the sexes. Once again, as in Hope’s films, role-reversals and standing in for another proves central to the film and to its disruptions of conventional gender roles. Allen’s detective solves his cases by putting himself in the criminal’s shoes. As in Wilkie Collins’ classic novel, The Moonstone (1869), this process of identification goes askew when Allen in fact turns out truly to be the criminal that he pursues. Like My Favorite Brunette, the film pointedly draws on the example of 1940s noir, mapping the men but more particularly the women against the possibilities and motifs of the cinema of that time. (Even the film’s woozy Orientalism regarding the WASP-ish ‘Voltan’ seems authentically dated.) With her dives into fountains and her notoriety as a ‘temptress’, Charlize Theron channels here the wildly seductive Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers), the younger sister of Lauren Bacall’s character in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946). In the publicity materials for The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Theron sets out the appeal of the role: Theron recalls that when Woody first spoke to her about playing Laura, he made the role sound almost irresistible for any actress: ‘The first time I talked to him about doing the part, he said, “If I were making this film in the ’40s, I would cast Lauren Bacall. Would you be interested?” Okay, so Woody Allen and Lauren Bacall – how difficult a decision is that? Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to be Lauren Bacall?’ (Curse publicity materials: 9)

‘Being Lauren Bacall’ is both the ultimate mark of glamour and also a delimiting gesture, modern Theron finding herself impersonating a woman from the past. Similarly, the same source tells us that Helen Hunt and Elizabeth Berkley: watched such ’40s classics as Double Indemnity and His Girl Friday, which served as valuable resources for the tone and style of the era. Berkley relates that she had tried to bring some of that style into the audition, but all nature had other plans. “I had my hair done like Veronica Lake for the audition, but as I was walking over the skies just opened up. By the time I got there, I looked more like I had fallen in Lake Veronica than I did Veronica Lake”. (Curse publicity materials: 10)

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Likewise, on the men’s side of the balance sheet, ‘Aykroyd indicated that the part was worth the wait, remarking, “I love that I got to play a heel in the classic ’40s sense”’ (10). A conscious homage to the past, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion’s production designer, Santo Loquasto, had also worked on period sets for Allen in Bullets Over Broadway and Radio Days. In designing Briggs’ and Fitzgerald’s apartments, Loquasto drew inspiration from the 1957 film Designing Women. Briggs’ somewhat dumpy apartment, located on 85th Street, takes after that of Gregory Peck’s character in that film, while Fitz’s stylish pad at Park Avenue and 35th echoes Lauren Bacall’s glamorous apartment. The insurance office was in a building on 80 Center Street, chosen for what Loquato had called its ‘Depression-era look, which was perfect for 1940… [Allen] wanted the office to have that Front Page look’ (Curse publicity materials: 12). Likewise, the music that echoes throughout the film (and indeed most of Allen’s films) similarly places the film in relation to a pop cultural past. The use of 1920s, 1930s and 1940s music enmeshes these films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in a dream of timelessness, where the themes of old songs chime in with, or jar against, the happenings of the present. Allen’s use of the American Song Book itself both dates the movies and places them out of their own time, in a world of the perennial, where ‘a kiss is just a kiss’ and ‘the fundamental things apply’. In part, the fundamental things that apply are precisely the delimited possibilities for men and women back then, still seen to be in operation now, at least in the entranced ambience of Allen’s films.

Allen on Holliday Allen’s entanglement in the Bob Hope persona gave the women in his films a way to respond and to frame themselves (or be framed) as the more active partner. Nonetheless, their identity emerges from within a couple. Indeed the ‘couple’ was central to the classic Hollywood comedy, the balancing of a Katherine Hepburn with a Spencer Tracy, a Bob Hope with a Rhonda Fleming, a Judy Holliday with a William Holden. The stars balance each other, and the identity of one plays out through its relation to the identity of another. Allen too is remembered as part of a couple, playing out in film after film, a relation first to Diane Keaton and later to Mia Farrow. This immersion in the couple was true too of the movies where Allen draws on Judy Holliday’s image and character, though here the woman’s part necessarily was the more fertile, the more potent.

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In George Cukor’s Born Yesterday (1950), based on Gordon Kanin’s stage play, Judy Holliday both inhabits and dismantles the ‘dumb blonde’ role as ‘Billie Dawn’. The movie begins by telling us that ‘a broad is a broad’ but in fact shows the heroine’s ability to reinvent herself – though without losing her identity in the process. Rather she allows what was unsuspected in her to flourish. The ‘husband’ role in Born Yesterday falls to Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford), a man who pointedly hasn’t married Billie Dawn. His narrowness, his uncultured incuriosity marked him out as someone whom the heroine must transcend. Holliday’s f ilms with Cukor chime indirectly with his other movies of the period that show women as either under the control of men (Gaslight [1944], A Star Is Born [1954]) or as finding mutuality and reciprocity with men. In Born Yesterday, Cukor and Holliday enact both these possibilities. In recycling Holliday’s position, Allen finds himself gifted with an approach to a woman’s agency that raises the stakes for his own female characters. Allen has spoken often of his enthusiasm for Judy Holliday and in particular for Born Yesterday. In an interview, he declared that: ‘The two best female comedians would be Diane Keaton and Judy Holliday’ (quoted in Björkman 1995: 257). He even suggested that Born Yesterday was one film that ought not to be remade; and yet, in part at least, that is precisely what Allen attempts to do in Small Time Crooks (ibid.: 265–256; Allen 2020: 323). Small Time Crooks was cited by many as being a return to the early Woody Allen, to thoughtless comedy and lightness – though many also regretted that the leading role once played by the youthful Allen was now embodied by the ageing version of the same man (Patterson 2001; Ellen 2002). If Allen here was felt to be reproducing Allen, nevertheless on its release, critics consistently described Small Time Crooks as a double for one film or another by other directors. Several saw it as borrowing from Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti, released in America as Big Deal in Madonna Street [1958] (Walker 2000). Critic after critic noted – and lamented – Allen’s penchant for pastiche, the uses of homage and what Gilbert Adair called ‘karaoke cinema’ (Toukey 2000; French 2000; Adair 2000). This entanglement with the past was precisely what worried Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian: ‘It’s a function, or perhaps a symptom, of Woody Allen’s escapist late-style that you can watch Small Time Crooks all the way through and keep forgetting that it’s supposed to be set in the present day’ (2000: 18). For Bradshaw, the film is regrettably ‘Runyonesque’, not set in the contemporary world but embedded ‘in the Manhattan of the 1930s and 1940s; or perhaps the timeless toytown Manhattan of Woody Allen’s imagination’ (ibid.: 18). This quality of seeming out of time, anachronistic, is

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in fact central to Allen’s aesthetic, entangled in his movies’ belonging both to then and to now, offering the viewer a double-take about Manhattan and about the possibilities involved in the relation between men and women. In the light of this, only one reviewer spotted that ‘The spirit of Judy Holliday and Born Yesterday is at work here’ (Quinn 2000: 10). In Small Time Crooks, Tracy Ullman is a kind of double for Allen himself, taking on the aspiring side of his character, the man impressed by Bergman and Kafka and W.B. Yeats even as he himself acts out his affiliation to the demotic through the petty criminal he plays, a connoisseur of sports and Harry James (not Henry). Allen is certainly as good at impersonating here a Bob Hope-like figure, and I guess most viewers and critics would say – though not, I would suspect, Allen himself – doing it rather better than Hope would. Though the competition is fierce, it is vital to the meaning of the film that Ullman similarly holds her own against the memory of Judy Holliday. Small Time Crooks is a makeover film where the lead actress makes herself over in the spirit of another long-dead star. Being remade is on the film’s mind. So it is that David (Hugh Grant) gives Frenchy (Tracey Ullman) a present of a vintage copy of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Shaw’s play clearly haunts the plot of Born Yesterday, as Allen himself has declared: ‘I’ve always said that the best comedy play in America is Born Yesterday, and giving birth to that was Shaw’s Pygmalion’ (quoted in Lax 2007: 257, 317). However, unlike Holliday’s Billie Dawn but akin to Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle, ‘Frenchy’ herself longs for ‘an education’; this is not something imposed on her by her man – though it’s a man who gives it to her. She’s also the one who succeeds, while the criminal schemes of her husband, Ray (Allen), are irredeemably feckless. The bank heist he’s planning falls flat, and it’s her cookie-making business that’s a hit, as it’s her theft of the Duke of Windsor’s cigarette case that keeps them in funds at the film’s close. This path to realization echoes for Ullman the process involved in making the film. Ullman herself noted that having fallen into imitating Allen’s delivery on set, she needed to f ind her own way of speaking the lines: ‘Woody’s written a film where for once the woman’s smarter, stronger and in some ways funnier than him. I needed to find my own voice.’ (quoted in Standing 2000: 44). Once again, contrariwise, the lead male part is notably inept. Many critics picked up on the strange threats of violence with which Ray menaces Frenchy. What might be as striking is the way that she completely ignores those threats, shrugging off his feeble attempts at dominance. What we are left with is Allen’s visible ageing, his scrawny, unthreatening impotence. In Born Yesterday, Holliday’s character, Billie Dawn, leaves and starts afresh

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with an actual husband (played by William Holden); in Small Time Crooks, where Allen plays the sports-loving, ‘low-brow’ partner, she returns to the marriage, their affection for each other renewed. As with the relation to Hope’s films, the engagement with Judy Holliday in Small Time Crooks once again places his movie in a curiously productive double relation: it is at once felt to be disappointingly mired in the past (and that would include by now Allen’s own past glories as a filmmaker), and yet it also resorts to what was in fact the open complexity and inspiriting ambiguity of the gender relationships set out in classic Hollywood films. If Allen was mining the past, he was discovering not dross there but gold.

Felliniesque In their relation to Hope (or Lubitsch) and to Judy Holliday, Allen’s borrowings from the past helped him to create roles where the women characters are the ones with courage, decisiveness and ability, matched against men who are feckless, sensitive and confused. A similar but differently slanted consequence emerges from those films of Allen’s that finds inspiration not in Hollywood but in European cinema in the form of Federico Fellini. Here, in drawing on Fellini, Allen’s films share an interest in innocence that is not seen as weakness but that in its humility represents strength. Allen has shown himself consistent in his belief that his own art is secondary and shallow and that the real artists were the masters elsewhere: in particular, Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini (Björkman 1995: 123). Regarding his huge admiration for Fellini, he has stated that: ‘I think his The White Sheik is perhaps the best sound comedy ever made’ (quoted in ibid.: 82). In both Stardust Memories (1980) – so indebted to Otto e Mezzo (1963) – and in the later homage to Fellini, To Rome With Love, we find Allen repeating the phrase ‘Ozymandias melancholia’ to denote those makers who are saddened by the ultimate futility of their art. Fellini stands here as the great artist whose work is condemned to supersession and ruin. In this way, Allen’s art plays with the imagined ruins of Fellini’s. The fact that Fellini’s works are being co-opted proves both a sign of life, and a kind of abrogation, being both enshrined and displaced by their thief. In Allen’s fairy-tale mockumentary of the world of 1930s American jazz, Sweet and Lowdown, Sean Penn as the legendary guitarist Emmet Ray hooks up with the mute young woman, Hattie (Samantha Morton). The film follows the pattern of Fellini’s La Strada (1954), with Morton riffing on Giulietta Masina’s portrayal of the holy fool, Gelsomina, and Penn rather

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more remotely on Anthony Quinn’s travelling strongman, Zampanò. There is no ‘Hattie’ without there first being a ‘Gelsomina’, simply because the film itself would not exist as it does if Fellini had not made La Strada. More explicitly, as Allen has described matters in interviews, there’s no ‘Hattie’ without Harpo Marx either. Her existence, her presence in Allen’s film, is in this sense dependent. Indeed, this condition of ‘dependence’ is part of her meaning within the movie, where she is seen, most fully, most often, as existing in relation to Emmett Ray. The movie creates threads of resemblance and difference, there in Emmett Ray’s entanglement within spurious historical fact, the protagonist of the kind of stories told about the jazz musicians of the 1920s and 1930s, and specifically through his subsidiary relationship to the ‘real thing’ that is Django Reinhardt as the ‘second best guitarist in the world’. This position of being secondary, of coming after, is intrinsic to Ray and to the film that he lives within. In narrative terms, Sweet and Lowdown’s most significant departure from La Strada lives through the introduction of Uma Thurman’s character, Blanche Williams. It becomes part of Blanche’s nature to be scarily, untrustworthily ‘independent’, a vision of a certain kind of 1930s’ femininity, with traces of Marlene Dietrich in the ‘masculine’ trouser-suit we see her wearing on her first appearance in the film. Though cast in the mould of Dietrich, and perhaps also of some archetypal women writers of the period, Blanche’s only form of ‘dependence’ comes through her mining Emmett – and the other men in her life – for copy. She stands as a writer, drawing on others’ identities for the fictions she plans to write. In this regard, her modus operandi constitutes a standard feature of how Allen imagines writing in his movies (as in Alvy Singer’s first play in Annie Hall), that is, that it should draw wholesale on ‘real life’ situations and be seen in that way as ‘stolen material’. Otherwise, Blanche is distressingly free and therefore suspect, an agent in search of fulfilling her own desire. Hattie is frankly sexual too, but her desire is strongly loyal; there is no question of her deceiving him, only the fact of his amorous betrayals of her. That Hattie marries another man and has children is only right, the sign of the fact that once an interdependence is cut, the free agents on either side of a relationship have no right any longer to constrain the other. After Emmett moves on, Hattie similarly moves on, and creating the situation in which that can come to pass is Emmett’s folly, the great mistake he makes that turns into actual, undeniable loss. In drawing on ‘Gelsomina’s’ holy folly, in being essentially silent, Hattie takes on the innocence of silence. She is pre-verbal, even ‘infantile’ in the Latinate sense of the word, as one unable to speak. That this condition of

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simplicity, of wordlessness, comes to be associated with essential goodness in the woman brings with it many problems. Gelsomina, and Hattie, are perhaps dream-figures, not active agents. In Fellini’s sense, ‘Giulietta … is not the face I have chosen, but a true soul of the film … she herself is the theme’ (Fellini 1976: 105). Hattie is at least not bound to having to ventriloquize Allen’s own cadences, the tricks of speech that so strongly mark his writing. Already in this sense, Hattie slips free from the writer’s grip. In another sense, too, Hattie is free, as if she exists as a shadow of Gelsomina: she also lives actually and vividly through the presence of Samantha Morton. As it is Morton who plays her and not Giulietta Masina, the film cannot help but become Morton’s movie. The extraordinary power of her acting, its comedic grief and openness, its freedom and mime-like physicality powers the movie. This centrality of the woman lives in Sweet and Lowdown too. As Emmet Ray, Sean Penn’s houndlike charisma falters and becomes uncertain before Hattie’s expressive silence. Only when he too foregoes speech, as he lets beauty breathe from his guitar, does he come close to approaching her completeness. Homage works at a less elevated level in To Rome With Love, a later film derived from Fellini’s work. Here, again, the fact of re-embodiment takes over; Allen’s film co-opts Fellini’s The White Sheik into no more than a strand of Allen’s multi-woven tapestry of Rome. The film is overall a disappointment, a loose coalition of some good jokes expanded (the man who can only sing great opera in the shower, or Roberto Benigni’s inexplicable fame) and tired tropes rehashed (the over-familiar dynamics of the Jack [Jesse Eisenberg] / Monica [Elliot Page] affair). The final thread of the tale is the plot of The White Sheik recited by heart, not learnt by rote. As ever, in this repetition of Fellini’s masterpiece, the movie follows the pattern of Allen’s other reinventions of classic cinema. Here is a woman whose identity entwines with the fact of indebtedness to an earlier film. Allen’s Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi) deviates from her involvement in that pre-existing plot, as Allen both riffs on the model and goes his own way. In the process, the woman who doubles the earlier role romantically strays and commits adultery. And then her gesture of ‘independence’ leads to a return to the marriage she has temporarily abandoned, reconstituting the original relationship. Here this theme of straying and returning so central to Allen’s revisions was already there in Fellini’s movie. In The White Sheik, Wanda (Brunella Bovo) is in costume, taken up into a performance, and yet she still insists that there are things bigger than her desire for Fernando Rivoli, the ‘Sheik’ himself; she is, in the final analysis, ‘not free’ to respond, and though taken in by her heartthrob’s fantastic lies, even as she sweetly weakens, fate intervenes and prevents so much as a kiss between them.

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The way that Allen improvises and deviates from the plot of The White Sheik is impressively surprising, though altogether less evocative and moving than what Fellini originally achieved. Fellini brings his comedy into touch with melancholy, as with its scene on the boat between the lecherous star and the shy ingenue, adrift and duplicitous, Nino Rota’s music signals sadness in the absurdity, or as the husband mournfully wanders the streets of Rome by night and encounters the streetwalker, Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) and her friend. Rather than this wan wistfulness, instead in the climactic scene in the hotel room Allen turns his movie into the mechanical vigour of bedroom farce. As in the best of farces, the scene moves through both the defeat of cliché and the borrowing of standard tropes. You believe that the scene is progressing in one way, with a pressing male star and a much-swayed, more than half-willing young wife, and an armed burglar enters the mix; you now think it’s a hold-up scene and the star’s wife arrives; the criminal joins in to help out, and in this role-reversal, you think it’s over, and then the burglar and the bride remain behind and make love. The return of the wife follows the way events unfold in The White Sheik, though there, her appearance is a very Felliniesque reassertion of womanly power. In Allen’s revision, it’s a brief distraction, and the enraged wife flits past in the flow of surprises. So, though this constant shift of gears takes some notes from Fellini, equally obviously Allen here – in his commitment to surprising the viewer – borrows from himself: the helpful burglar reprises the opening scene in Radio Days, the woman turned-on by a criminal replays Sweet and Lowdown. Wonder has been made familiar, and the familiar becomes again wonderful. In transforming, and reproducing, Fellini’s great comedy, Allen profoundly alters the nature of the straying wife. The original character’s innocence becomes a kind of knowingness, not least in that in Allen’s film it all takes place as a knowing revision of the earlier movie, both wholeheartedly loving the previous film and pointedly recasting it. Yet at the same time, in To Rome With Love, the bride’s liberation is to turn into someone from another film. Her gesture of romantic independence involves both being, and not being, in the shadow of another.

Cited Work In Allen’s borrowing from earlier films, there is the mingled yearning to make the earlier work again, both in celebration of its difference and by nonetheless turning it into a Woody Allen movie. In a sense, Allen has approached those works in the spirit of a certain kind of critic, one motivated

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by the desire to praise, simply to say how marvellous these good things were. Also perhaps like a critic, he reimagines the films in the process, seeing in them tensions and processes that reflect the critic’s own preoccupations and not what might be there. In the course of engaging with them, indeed of borrowing from them, Allen may be thought to have merged them into his own narcissistic regard, to have taken possession of them in a limiting sense. I would argue that more complexly, he has revived them, revivified them, and in remaking or revising them, allowed the fact of their difference from him to enter into his own movies. Through Allen’s women existing in relation to Judy Holliday, Dorothy Lamour, Rhonda Fleming, Giulietta Masina or Brunella Bovo, they take on some tint of the original star, some resonance of a persona now gone, and yet remain able to transcend their indebtedness and be themselves. The women of these films of Allen’s live in an anagogical relationship to a person from the past, the fulfilment in the present of a presence from back then. As such, they suggest both a continuity between the pop-culture world of Allen’s youth and the possibilities open to living actors now. They also represent their own difference, the distinction of not being the original themselves. In entering Allen’s oeuvre, the films that he borrows from become in some sense his own. And yet their difference, their pre-eminence remains. Sweet and Lowdown has not displaced La Strada, and Small Time Crooks has hardly bettered Born Yesterday; if anything, the existence of Allen’s version of their plots bolsters the sense of those earlier works as ‘classics’, where it is precisely their ability to fructify again in a new movie that signals the quality of their ongoing life. The same process of assimilation and survival enters into Allen’s portraits of the women in his films. They come to life through his fantasy – fantasies that are often borrowed, that are debts. And yet, in the films themselves, these pictures of the past come to life, and the otherness – the difference of the characters and the actors who play them – shows itself as strong. Though Allen absorbs the pop culture world, though he writes the script and directs the women, he leaves a space where what we see is the livingness of Diane Keaton, of Tracy Ullman, of Samantha Morton, and the many other women who have found themselves in his films.

Bibliography Adair, Gilbert. (2000). Woody’s Latest: Minor Work by a True Artist. Independent On Sunday, December 3, Culture p. 3.

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Allen, Woody. (1968). Play It Again, Sam: A Romantic Comedy in Three Acts. London, New York and Toronto: Samuel French. —. (2020). Apropos of Nothing: Autobiography. New York: Arcade Publishing. Ames, Christopher. (2013). Jazz Heaven: Woody Allen and the Hollywood Ending. In Bailey, Peter J., and Sam B. Girgus (Eds.), A Companion to Woody Allen. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 207–226. Björkman, Stig. (ed.) (1995). Woody Allen on Woody Allen. London: Faber & Faber. Bradshaw, Peter (2000). Fun-Loving Criminals. The Guardian, December 1, Review, p. 18. Cardullo, Bert. (2006). Autumn Interiors, or the Ladies Eve: Woody Allen’s Bergman Complex. In Charles L.P. Silet (Ed.), The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays. Lanham, Maryland, Toronto, and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press. pp. 133–144. Curse of the Jade Scorpion, The, [Publicity materials], in the BFI Film Collection. Dignam, Virginia. (1972). Review of Play It Again, Sam. Morning Star, December 15. Ellen, Barbara. (2002). No Laughing Matter. The Times, December 5, Section 2, p. 13. Fellini, Federico. (1976). Fellini on Fellini. New York: Da Capo Press. Frears, Stephen. (1972). Review of Play It Again, Sam. The Times, December 15. French, Philip. (2000). Too Many Cookies. The Observer, December 3, Review, p. 7. Fusco, Katherine. (2013). Love and Citation in Midnight in Paris: Remembering Modernism, Remembering Woody. in Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus (Eds.), A Companion to Woody Allen. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 294–317. Gehring, Wes D. (2006). Woody Allen and Fantasy: Play It Again, Sam. In Charles L.P. Silet (Ed.), The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays. Lanham, Maryland, Toronto, and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, pp. 89–99. Gibbs, Patrick. (1972). Review of Play It Again, Sam. Daily Telegraph, December 15. King, Claire Sisco. (2013). Play It Again, Woody: Self-Reflexive Critique in Contemporary Woody Allen Films. In Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus (Eds.), A Companion to Woody Allen. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 188–206. Lasch, Christopher. (1991). The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations [1979]. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. Lax, Eric. (2007). Conversations with Woody Allen. London: Aurum Press. Malcolm, Derek. (1972). Review of Play It Again, Sam. The Guardian, December 17. Melly, George. (1972). Play It Again, Sam. The Observer, December 17. Meredith, George. (1877). An Essay on Comedy. London: Constable & Co. Miller, D.A. (2008). 8½. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Norman, Neil. (2002). Why Can’t I Get My New Film Released in Britain. [Interview with Woody Allen]. Evening Standard, April 18, p. 35. Patterson, John. (2001). Stale Tales. The Guardian, August 28, p. 12. Powell, Dilys. (1972). Play It Again, Sam. Sunday Times, December 17. Quinn, Anthony. (2000). ‘Crimes and Missed Opportunities’, Independent, Friday Review, December 1, p. 10.

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Robinson, David. (1972). Review of Play It Again, Sam. Financial Times, December 15. Standing, Sarah. (, 2000). Character Building [Interview with Tracey Ullman]. Daily Telegraph, Weekend Magazine, December 2, p. 44. Thirkell, Arthur. (1972). Review of Play It Again, Sam. Daily Mirror, December 15. Toukey, Christopher. (2000). Woody’s Cookie Dough Caper. Daily Mail, December 1, p. 54. Walker, Alexander. (1972). Review of Play It Again, Sam. Evening Standard, December 14. Walker, Alexander. (2000). Woody Takes a Bite at Crime. Evening Standard, November 30, p. 29. Yacowar, Maurice. (2006). Beyond Parody: Woody Allen in the 1980s. In Charles L.P. Silet (ed.), The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays. Lanham, Maryland, Toronto, and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2006, pp. 78–88.

Filmography Annie Hall. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1977 The Big Sleep. Directed by Howard Hawks. USA: Warner Brothers. 1946 Born Yesterday. Directed by George Cukor. USA: Columbia Pictures. 1950 Bullets Over Broadway. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Miramax Films. 1994 Casablanca. Directed by Michael Curtiz. USA: Warner Brothers. 1942 The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Gravier Productions / DreamWorks Pictures. 2001 Designing Women. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. USA: Metro-Goldywn-Mayer. 1957 Double Indemnity. Directed by Billy Wilder. USA: Paramount Pictures. 1944 Gaslight. Directed by George Cukor. USA: Metro-Goldywn-Mayer. 1944 The Great Lover. Directed by Alexander Hall. USA: Paramount Pictures. 1949 His Girl Friday. Directed by Howard Hawks. USA: Columbia Pictures. 1940 Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves). Directed by Vittorio De Sica. Italy: Produzioni De Sica / Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche. 1948 Love and Death. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions. 1975 Manhattan Murder Mystery. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: TriStar Pictures. 1993 Midnight in Paris. Directed by Woody Allen. USA / Spain: Gravier Productions / Mediapro / Televisió de Catalunya / Versátil Cinema. 2011 My Fair Lady. Directed by George Cukor. USA: Warner Brothers. 1964 My Favorite Blonde. Directed by Sidney Lanfield. USA: Paramount Pictures. 1942 My Favorite Brunette. Directed by Elliott Nugent. USA: Hope Enterprises / Paramount Pictures. 1947

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Otto e Mezzo. Directed by Federico Fellini. Italy / France: Cineriz / Francinex. 1963 Radio Days. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Orion Pictures. 1987 Rosemary’s Baby. Directed by Roman Polanski. USA: Paramount Pictures. 1968 Small Time Crooks. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Sweetland Pictures. 2000 I soliti ignoti (Big Deal in Madonna Street). Directed by Mario Monicelli. Italy: Lux Film. 1958 Stardust Memories. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1980 A Star Is Born. Directed by George Cukor. USA: Transcona Enterprises / Warner Brothers. 1954 La Strada. Directed by Federico Fellini. Italy: Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica. 1954 A Streetcar Named Desire. Directed by Elia Kazan. USA: Warner Brothers. 1951 Sweet and Lowdown. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Sweetland Pictures. 1999 The Third Man. Directed by Carol Reed. United Kingdom: London Pictures. 1949 To Rome With Love. Directed by Woody Allen. USA / Italy: Medusa Film / Gravier Productions / Perdido Production. 2012 They Drive By Night. Directed by Raoul Walsh. USA: Warner Brothers. 1940 The White Sheik (Lo sceicco bianco). Directed by Federico Fellini. Italy: OFI / P.D.C. 1952

About the Author Michael Newton teaches literature and film at Leiden University. He is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (Faber, 2002), Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865–1981 (Faber, 2012), and of books on the films Kind Hearts and Coronets (2002), Rosemary’s Baby (2019) and It’s a Wonderful Life (2023) for the BFI Film Classics series. He’s also the author of Show People: A History of the Film Star (Reaktion 2019).

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Negotiating ‘Dis-ease’ Jewish Women in the Work of Woody Allen Roberta Mock Abstract This chapter focuses on the intersection of Jewish woman characters and the Jewish actors who play them in the work of Woody Allen. It analyses how work made with Allen informs and calibrates the star texts of Jewish women performers such as Julie Kavner, Scarlett Johansson, Louise Lasser and Elaine May. In doing so, the chapter explores the intersecting causes of anxiety when engaging with Allen’s work as a Jewish woman and embraces a sense of disorienting ambivalence as the starting point for potentially recuperative, intertextual readings. Keywords: Jewish, hysteria, star studies, intertextuality

In her article ‘Twice an Outsider: On Being Jewish and a Woman’ (a title that sums up a great deal of Jewish feminist thinking that arose in the 1980s), Vivian Gornick recalls watching one of Woody Allen’s movies in the early 1970s. She doesn’t know which one – perhaps Bananas, perhaps Sleeper, almost certainly one of the slapstick, clowny, funny ones – but clearly remembers experiencing the revelation that she was disgusted by the cultural work of Jewish men like Milton Berle, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen. They were, she writes, ‘trashing women. Using women to savage the withholding world. Using us. Their mothers, their sisters, their wives. To them, we weren’t friends or comrades. We weren’t even Jews or gentiles. We were just girls’ (1989: 31). Gornick, who is exactly Allen’s age and grew up in the Bronx, observes that, while his character in Annie Hall is obsessed with getting laid, ‘It’s not a Jewish girl he’s trying to get into bed…. The Jewish girl is Brooklyn. Annie Hall is Manhattan’ (ibid.). Alvy Singer’s sexual success with a gentile beauty – a shiksa, which is a pejorative term

Hall, Martin R. (ed.), Women in the Work of Woody Allen. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463722926_ch07

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for a non-Jewish woman – ‘means everything’ (ibid.), for him as Allen’s proxy and so for the movie. We are thus directed spatio-temporally to turn away from the Jewish women in Annie Hall and discouraged from engaging positively and identifying with them when they do appear on screen. Almost 30 years after Gornick’s piece was published, Claire Dederer wrote an essay for The Paris Review, the majority of which discusses her attempt to negotiate how she could watch Allen’s movies and what happens when she then chooses to speak about that experience. She explains why Allen’s Manhattan made her ‘feel urpy’ and describes her castigation by a male critic for ‘having the wrong feeling’ about ‘a work of genius’ (2017, emphasis in original).1 It was then little more than a month after the #MeToo movement re-emerged in the wake of (eventually substantiated) allegations of serial sexual assault and harassment by Harvey Weinstein. Allen had already offered what was interpreted as support for Weinstein (see Mumford 2017), who is the producer often credited for resurrecting Allen’s career following the scandal of the latter’s affair in the early 1990s with his now-wife Soon-Yi Previn, his ex-partner’s daughter. Within another month, Dylan Farrow, Allen’s estranged adopted daughter, renewed her criticism of those women actors who continued to work with him despite her insistent allegations that Allen sexually abused her when she was seven years old. Dederer offers the possibility of valuing and incorporating guiltproducing feelings of pleasure and self-aff irmation that arise through cultural products that may be distressing, contextually or in themselves. She writes: Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the (male) maker, against the audience. Me, I’m not ahistorical or immune to biography. That’s for the winners of history (men) (so far). The thing is, I’m not saying I’m right or wrong. But I’m the audience. And I’m just acknowledging the realities of the situation: the film Manhattan is disrupted by our knowledge of Soon-Yi; but it’s also kinda gross in its own right; and it’s also got a lot of things about it that are pretty great. All these things can be true at once. (Dederer 2017)

1 I will bracket the problematic finale of Dederer’s article in which she somehow pivots to the monstrosity of the female writer/mother who abandons her children to selfishly complete her work.

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The acknowledgement of contradiction presents a way into negotiating the sensation of ‘dis-ease’ when experiencing Allen’s work, an emotion akin to Dederer’s ‘urpiness’. Patrick Duggan describes the performative aesthetics of ‘dis-ease’ as those that induce a sense of anxiety – of feeling unsettled, of disorientation – in their audiences (2017: 40). In a state of dis-ease, the world ‘becomes othered, distanced and shimmers in and out of readability in an encounter that makes one feel disoriented in it and perturbed by the experience of it’ (ibid.: 45, emphasis in original). For some of Allen’s movies – Deconstructing Harry (1997), for example – this seems to be his intention, mirroring the anxiety of his public persona, the characters he plays himself, or else his surrogates on screen. Often, this anxiety is presented as a symptom of Jewishness and (closely related) as either a manifestation of, or manifested in, his/their relationships with Jewish women – in particular, mothers, wives and ex-wives. It is possible, however, to redirect attention away from Allen and to focus instead on the Jewish women who, in Allen’s body of work taken as a whole, are both marginalized and relied upon due to the insistent centring on and from his own perspective. In our current so-called ‘cancel culture’, which impacts whether and how audiences choose to engage with Allen’s films, this recognizes the complex histories, professional labour and skill of actors who, perhaps, have worked with and ‘stood by’ Allen because they were (and are) trying to make a living under patriarchal conditions. This is not to ignore, minimize or excuse reports of Allen’s behaviour or the messages of his films but to refuse to blame and erase the bodies of women from the products of an industry that has offered scant opportunity for those deemed ‘ethnic’ or ‘old’ (or both) and that has restricted personal and creative expression outside of those dictated by dominant gender and beauty standards. This chapter therefore explores how work made with Woody Allen informs and calibrates the star texts of Jewish women performers such as Julie Kavner, Scarlett Johansson, Louise Lasser and Elaine May. These are the narratives that comprise their public performances, both on and off screen and stage, and produce the impression of authenticity and coherence: an impression achieved by creating an image that is reinforced by staged or mimetic performances and by intertextually quoting performative identity constructions that are always already reiterative and socially produced. Even when this is not a deliberate strategy on the part of a performer or the publicity machinery that surrounds her, it is possible to read a career, often recursively, on these terms. Giovanna del Negro has argued that when Jewish women make an appearance in Allen’s films, they are ‘generally depicted in terms of shticky

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one-liners or comical exaggerations’ and presented as either ‘fervently intellectual or ambitious careerists’ (2014: 143) or else overbearing and manipulative smotherers of children or husbands (that is, the stereotypical American Jewish mother). Del Negro maps how the central problems in many of Allen’s films stem from a specific perception of Jewish domesticity: ‘a stifling marriage, a sexually disinterested wife, the burden of children and religion, and a placid home life that inexorably leads to the loss of male identity and lack of pleasure’ (ibid.). However, she also observes that, even though Allen’s Jewish female characters are largely erased or ridiculed, their representation is ‘more ambivalent and complex than this might suggest’ (ibid.: 144). This is certainly the case when considering Julie Kavner, the actor who has performed the most significant, and numerous, roles as explicitly Jewish women in Allen’s film, stage and television work.

Julie Kavner Best known now as the voice of Marge Simpson on the long-running comedy animation The Simpsons (1989–present), Kavner had been a household name in the United States as Brenda Morgenstern in the series Rhoda between 1974 and 1978. A spin-off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda was notable because it was a sitcom that centred on a Jewish woman character, which hadn’t happened since The Goldbergs (1948–1956), starring Gertrude Berg. Kavner played the title character’s younger sister: an always-dating, always-dieting bank teller who was warm, down-to-earth and trod-upon. Interestingly, in the casting of a television programme about the familial relationship of three Jewish women, only Kavner was Jewish herself. The critic Pauline Kael described her presence as ‘transcendent plainness’ (quoted in Ickes 1997: 85), and this is precisely what she brought to Allen’s films when he first cast her in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). She was then in her mid-thirties and, despite having won an Emmy award for her work on Rhoda, Kavner’s career was in the doldrums. Although Allen has always claimed his movies are not autobiographical, there’s a remarkable consistency in his performing persona that makes such a conflation inevitable. This is significant when he is working with an actor like Kavner who has variously played – with the same consistency of presence – his girlfriend, his ex-fiancé and his wife. In Radio Days (1987), which Allen has acknowledged is loosely based on his own childhood (2020: 244), Kavner plays the mother of the fictionalized child version of himself. We meet her in the kitchen of the shared family home in Queens, listening

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to the radio and imagining the glamour of the city, Manhattan, and the life that is out of reach: ‘There are those who drink champagne at nightclubs’, she later says, ‘and us who listen to them drink champagne on the radio’. The extended family – and hence Jewishness, which is portrayed primarily as a relative position of class – revolves around the figure of the mother; on a fundamental level, she is the reason why all of these people live in the same house. Kavner, as ‘Tess, the Mother’, is forthright, grounded, busy, pragmatic and deadpan funny. ‘Pay more attention to your schoolwork and less to the radio’, she tells her son, who quickly points out that ‘You always listen to the radio.’ ‘It’s different’, she responds, poking her head around the kitchen door, ‘Our lives are ruined already. You still have a chance to grow up and be somebody.’ Seven years later, Kavner was cast as Allen’s wife in Don’t Drink the Water (1994), the television version of a stage play he wrote in the 1960s. It is difficult to understand why Allen decided to resurrect this Cold War farce – which in his memoir, Apropos of Nothing, he variously describes as ‘hapless’ (2020: 50), ‘poorly written’ (114) and ‘junk’ (142) – at this particular moment. Perhaps it was to draw attention away from the recent revelations of his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn by portraying himself in an ‘age appropriate’ relationship with a grown-up child (played by the Jewish actor, Mayim Bialik) about to get married herself. The relationship performed by Allen, as Walter Hollander, and Kavner as his wife Marion, is almost identical to the one she plays with the figure of his father in Radio Days – that is, as an affectionate passive-aggressive kvetch fest. ‘I love him, but what did I do to deserve him?’, Allen/Joe imagines Kavner/Tess saying on a marriage counselling radio programme after his father complains about her lack of encouragement and the constant presence of her familial ‘tribe’. ‘You’re such a noodge’, Walter tells Marion early in Don’t Drink the Water, as she complains about his lack of culture and neurotic eating habits.

Kavner, Allen and Jewishness Whenever Kavner and Allen – whom she calls ‘the Wood-Man’ (Haithman 1989) – appear on screen together, their Jewishness is intimately connected – performatively establishing, reinforcing and amplifying each other’s. Her characters are always presented with some warmth, despite the evident horror of other Jewish female characters in his body of work, often in the very same film. In Oedipus Wrecks, which is the section Allen directed for the three-part ‘anthology’ movie, New York Stories (1989), Kavner plays Treva, a psychic/tarot

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card reader/shaman/pianist/out-of-work actor/waitress. She is contacted by Allen’s character, Sheldon, in the hope that she will be able to solve a problem he is having with his mother who, due to an inexplicable accident during a magic trick, is currently hovering over New York City and humiliating him. Nobody knows how she got there; one moment she is entering a magician’s box on stage, and then (after a period of a few weeks during which Sheldon’s sex life improves with Lisa, his non-Jewish fiancée, played by Mia Farrow), she has reappeared to broadcast to everybody in the city that he used to wet the bed and shortened his Jewish surname from Millstein to Mills. Sheldon’s mother Sadie succeeds in driving away Lisa, whom she calls a ‘kurvah’ (‘whore’ in Yiddish), and finally returns to earth when he decides to marry Treva, who boils him up some chicken, eats with her fingers, and is delighted to look at the many photos Sadie carries with her of Sheldon as a child. As Allen himself describes it, ‘I wind up with the more parentally satisfying Semite, Julie Kavner’ rather than with Farrow who he says played ‘the female lead’ (2020: 252), despite having less screen time than Kavner.2 The fundamental problem Sheldon expresses to his psychiatrist in the opening scene of Oedipus Wrecks is that, at the age of 50, he still hasn’t resolved his relationship with his mother. This relationship, according to Martha Ravits, is based on a matrophobia that enacts the ‘double regression’ to childhood resentment and Jewish origin (2000: 23) – that is, the inability to fully assimilate and belong within dominant culture. The inflated vengeance of Sadie Millstein as visual icon links the stereotype of the overpowering, omniscient Jewish mother to the film’s heavily signposted Oedipal theme and so, for Ravits, to Freudian psychoanalytic misogyny that blames women for socio-sexual maladjustment (ibid.: 24–25). However, in choosing to marry Treva at the end of the film, Allen metaphorically returns to the Jewish womb; moreover, this is established symbolically through the tropes of maternal acceptance and shared foodways, since it is never explicitly stated that Treva is Jewish. As Ravits notes, Treva resembles his mother in both her choice of eye wear and intonation (ibid.: 24), the latter of which is significant since both Kavner and the Jewish actor Mae Questel, who plays Sadie Millstein, are professionally recognized primarily through their voices and vocal performance. From the early 1930s onward, Questel was the voice of both Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl and Betty Boop, whose earliest cartoons embodied the Jewish ‘Ghetto Girl’ stereotype and were drawn against a New 2 Most of the scenes in which Farrow appears are dominated by Mae Questrel. Farrow’s longest speech is actually a voiceover, spoken while Allen is seen reading the note she left under his door to end their relationship.

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York ‘neighborhood of Yiddish shops and immigrant personages’ (Schwadron 2018: 62). Although she appears infrequently on film, Questel does have a small part in the 1969 movie Funny Girl – the ur-text of Jewish American performance by women – starring Barbra Streisand and based on the life of Fanny Brice, whom Questel impersonated early in her career. Despite the scattering of clues, from the f ilm’s title to its use of the tune ‘I Want A Girl (Just Like The Girl That Married Dear Old Dad)’ in the soundtrack, Sheldon’s primal fear (and its narrative outcome) seems not so much that of marrying his mother as marrying somebody who will eventually become her. Unlike Sadie’s Jewishness, Kavner’s as Treva is one of loving acceptance, of tikkun olam, or healing the world. However, if we read her intertextually as a protean mid-twentieth-century Jewish-American Everywoman across and through Allen’s body of work – foreshadowed by Kavner having already embodied both his mother and wife – there is every reason to believe she is expected to eventually conform to type. This mirrors a parallel fear for Jewish women as daughters in the second half of the twentieth century in North America. At the time Oedipus Wrecks was made, Kavner was a member of the regular cast of The Tracey Ullman Show, a half-hour variety programme during which the company played a wide range of characters and from which The Simpsons sprang. One 1987 episode features an extraordinary long sketch, called ‘Like Mother’ (dir. Miller), in which Kavner plays an overbearing (again, presumably Jewish) mother who drives Ullman crazy with her demands and criticisms. Later, in a horror-movie-like scenario, Ullman succumbs to her ultimate nightmare and transforms into her mother, starting uncannily with Kavner’s raspy voice. Kavner’s is ‘one of the great television voices’, once described as ‘honeyed gravel’ with ‘a sandpapered gruffness that can sound exasperated and comforting all at once’ (de Vries 1992: 22). In The Jew’s Body, the cultural historian Sander Gilman identifies the voice as one of the key markers of Jewishness – read otherness and difference. He notes that, in mid-twentiethcentury America, the most ‘authentic’ Jewish voice was the one associated with ‘New Yawk’ (1991: 34). Woody Allen’s distinctive comic voice, ‘nasal in timbre and high in pitch’ and ‘known as a series of tics and inflections’, is understood ‘as much as an expression of his cultural status – that of a Jewish intellectual from Brooklyn – as it is of his inner life’ (Whittaker 2017: 120). It is no coincidence that, despite being born in California, the ‘rich Bronx bouquet’ of Kavner’s voice has led many to assume she is from a New York borough, like her parents (de Vries 1992). One the main ways Jewishness is produced and recognized for actors like Kavner and Questel (and, of course, Allen) is through their voices, which are

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the products of what Diana Taylor would describe as a specific ‘taxonomic, disciplinary and mnemonic’ system of cultural memory (2003: 86). Voices are both produced by bodies and can also themselves produce bodies. Steven Connor refers to these bodies as ‘vocalic’, and they are created, shaped and sustained through the oscillating operations between the speaking object and speaking subject (2000: 35). In casting Kavner and Questel, Allen is exploiting a complex system of cultural memory – one that is impossible to separate from race and gender (Taylor 2003: 35) – to construct meaning through the recognition of reiterated embodied scenarios as well as intertextual performance genealogies.

Scarlett Johansson Johansson, a blockbuster Hollywood star who has made three movies with Allen, is often referred to as one of his ‘muses’ (see, for example, Cadwalladr 2014). In 2005, the year they first worked together on Allen’s Match Point, Esquire magazine had this to say about her: ‘That voice…. It’s a thing of shivers. Husky but not a smoker’s hack, deep but not masculine, breathy but not gaspy, a trace of New York but not Queens, New York. It’s perfection.’ (Jones 2013, emphasis added). A New Yorker piece the same year described how Johansson ‘appears to speak to us through a stream of invisible smoke’, drawing attention to precisely how the vocalic body operates: ‘her seductive nonappearance’ in the film Her (2014), ‘showed how much body survives in the disembodied’ (Lane 2014). Both articles, like many others, compare Johansson to Lauren Bacall, one of Hollywood’s few Jewish stars in the 1940s, although her Jewishness was carefully concealed by studio machinery. Bacall’s so-called May-December relationship with the much older Humphrey Bogart both quietly ghosts Johansson’s adult breakthrough movie with Bill Murray, Lost in Translation (2003) and acts as a historical anchor to render Allen’s with a young woman in Manhattan (1979) unexceptional. However, in Scoop (2006), Johansson’s second movie with Allen, they establish quite a different relationship and one unique in Allen’s body of work. Johansson is not fetishized for her youth like Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan. Rather, in the role of Sondra Pransky, she is made into a daughter figure. Allen rarely appears as a father himself in his movies. One exception is to Mayim Bialik in Don’t Drink the Water, but despite a shared Jewishness that is intertextually reinforced,3 Walter passes on the family 3 Bialik’s screen debut was as the child version of Bette Midler’s ballsy Jewish New York character in the 1988 film Beaches.

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catering business to the non-Jewish man she eventually marries, played by Michael J. Fox, who has shown a talent for sculpting chopped liver. By contrast, Allen and Johansson’s relationship in Scoop is one of elective intergenerational kinship signified through Jewishness.

Reading Jewish Allen plays a stage magician called Splendini who is performing to packed houses in London. Just like Sadie Millstein in Oedipus Rex, Sondra is picked out of the audience to get into his magician’s box and, while in there, has a transformative experience. 4 The scene in which Splendini and Sondra first meet on stage is a case study in the establishment of shared Jewishness, without ever stating this explicitly. Allen immediately refers to Johansson as a landsman, which is Yiddish for somebody who comes from the same shtetl. He tells her that she’s a credit to her – meaning their – race. They establish that they both come from Brooklyn, which (like Queens and the Bronx) always represents Jewishness in Allen’s films. He calls her ‘Sondra Mandelbaum’, a recognizably Jewish surname, and when she corrects him, Splendini sub-vocalizes: ‘You take off the same holidays. What’s the difference?’ Asked whether she has ever dematerialized before, Sondra is worried and confides that she just ate; Allen replies, ‘I’ll do the jokes, Sondra’, drawing attention to the way he has extended a tradition of Jewish comedy by using his own bodily discomfort as the source of humour throughout his career. Layered on top of Johansson’s already extraordinary voice, she is appropriating Allen’s gestures and mannerisms – awkward, neurotic – which, again, in his body/body of work are always coded as Jewish and, usually, as funny. At the same time, in this scene and more widely in the movie as a whole – and even more so in the other films Johansson has made with Allen, including Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) two years later – he draws attention to what Johansson can do that he cannot: she is able to ‘pass’ (as not Jewish). This brief description of a scene from Scoop is an example – like the interpretations above of Treva in Oedipus Wrecks or Kavner’s ‘Jewish’ mother on the Tracey Ullman Show – of what Henry Bial calls ‘reading Jewish’. He argues that Jewish continuity is ‘transmitted through performance via the mechanism of double coding’ through which a Jewish audience member 4 Sondra meets the ghost of a journalist, played by Ian McShane, setting off the adventure, but that’s not important in this context.

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‘may decode Jewishness through aural, visual, or emotional/genre signs’ that are interpreted as ‘universal’ by non-Jewish audiences (2005: 152). One of his examples is the dominant critical response in 1971 to Woody Allen’s film Play It Again, Sam, an homage to Humphrey Bogart’s masculinity – but his observations apply to any of Allen’s films in which Jewishness is not explicitly declared. Bial notes that choosing to read Jewish ‘requires the belief that at least some of the time those whose behaviour we read as Jewish would proudly acknowledge acting Jewish as their intent’ (149).5 What this means is that when del Negro chooses to read Pearl in Interiors (1978), played by Maureen Stapleton, as Jewish (2014: 154–155), this is based on Allen’s authority; the character is acting Jewish through him rather than through the performer. By way of contrast, I propose that Johansson is choosing to act Jewish so that audiences are able to read her as Jewish; she not only passes ‘as not Jewish’ in Allen’s work but also, by working with Allen, she is able to pass ‘as Jewish’. At the moment that Johansson was consciously forging the shape of her adult career and public image, this enabled her to establish a ‘Jewish star text’, one that complexifies an image of Hollywood stardom for women through associations with humour and intellectualism. Johansson identifies as Jewish herself and, in 2017, appeared on the American version of the television programme Who do you think you are, learning about relatives who died in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Shoah. Most of the awkward missteps of Johansson’s career can be associated with Jewishness. The first, if we understand her working relationship with Allen to be at least partly one of Jewish affiliation, was her response in 2014 to Dylan Farrow’s naming and shaming of actors who worked with her father. Johansson described Farrow as ‘irresponsible’ for dragging women like her into a family matter that she could know nothing about (Cadwalladr 2014) and said that she saw no reason why she would not work with Allen again (Lane 2014). In the same year, Johansson decided to resign from her role as an Oxfam ambassador when the charity criticized her appearance in ads for the Israeli company SodaStream which had factories in the West Bank. Johansson has continued to stand by both decisions, although has worked with neither Allen nor SodaStream since.6 Perhaps less obviously linked to Jewishness in the contemporary public imaginary is criticism of Johansson for accepting 5 My choice to ‘read Jewish’ as a woman is largely driven by the desire to recognize and reflect upon Jewishness: to perhaps identify with and locate power in the agentive performance strategies of other Jewish women, past and present. 6 As a side note, Mayim Bialik succeeded Johansson as SodaStream’s public face, and it no longer has a factory in occupied territory.

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roles as a trans man (she subsequently withdrew from this project) and as a character that was originally Asian. The ability of Jewish women to ‘pass’ has historically destabilized boundary positions (Jewish/not Jewish; white/ of colour; Eastern/Western; feminine/masculine); however, traversing them has also meant sliding into uncomfortable professional expectations and cultural appropriations on stage and screen.

Discomfort and Hysteria While Julie Kavner has played some of the most sympathetic, explicitly Jewish women characters in Allen’s film work, these are not without their spectatorial challenges. In a 1992 interview that emphasizes how selective she is about accepting roles, Kavner states that she would happily retire ‘except for doing three days a year for Woody if I could get that’. This is possibly out of a sense of loyalty to the man who she says ‘freed’ her (de Vries 1992). In Hannah and Her Sisters, Kavner plays Gail, professional colleague and enabler to Allen’s character Mickey, who is a showrunner for a television comedy programme. She bursts on screen seconds after his first appearance and stands behind him, literally and metaphorically, as he tries to convince a network standards officer to broadcast a sketch about child molestation. Later, when Mickey says he wants to quit the business, Gail recommends that he clears his head by ‘going to a whorehouse’. My dis-ease in this case, born of a sense of disjunction between spoken text and the body speaking it, pales next to my experience of reading Allen’s play, Honeymoon Motel, and imagining its staging. Playing the character of Fay Roth, on Broadway in 2011, Kavner describes how her Uncle Shlomo molested her when she was a little girl. ‘At least you were molested’, replies her husband, re-centring himself in the disclosure of her trauma. ‘I didn’t have sex till I was twenty-five – you were the first one.’ (Allen 2013: 56). Allen then has Fay joke about her husband’s inexperience as well as Uncle Shlomo, whom she determined ‘needed reading glasses’ because of the way he turned her every which way while he sexually abused her ‘with three fingers’. The name, Shlomo, positions this abuse firmly within the Jewish domestic sphere. One of the reasons the term ‘dis-ease’ is particularly useful in discussing responses to Allen’s work is because of the way it conjures the spectre of late nineteenth-century psychoanalytic culture: a culture that is central to the racialized construction of modern Jewishness as well as to Allen’s film craft. Scenarios and tropes of psychoanalysis have consistently driven and framed

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Allen’s plots, narratives, rhythms and characterizations; Oedipus Wrecks, which starts with Allen describing a dream to his therapist – of his mother’s disembodied voice harassing him from inside her coffin as he drives to her funeral – is just one example. In the introduction to a volume of essays about Freud’s case study of his unsuccessful analysis of his patient ‘Dora’, Claire Kahane defines hysteria as ‘the dis-ease of patriarchal culture’ (1985: 31). Dora’s real name was Ida Bauer, and she came from a family – like so many of Freud’s patients – of highly assimilated, wealthy Jews. As Elaine Showalter describes Ida’s story, she was ‘handed over’ at the age of 14 by her father to both his friend, Herr K, to become his lover and then on to Freud to subsequently cure. Ida walked away from treatment after Freud insisted that she was in love with both Herr K and Freud himself (Showalter 1993: 317). She wasn’t having it. Hysteria, according to Freud, transforms libidinal impulses into symptoms. At the fin de siècle, it was a disease, like tuberculosis and syphilis, associated in dominant Western discourse with feminized men – that is, homosexuals and Eastern European Jews – as well as masculine or bisexual women like the stereotypical ‘Jewess’, upon whose analysis almost every early theory of hysteria and sexual difference was formulated. And yet the Jewish woman – or rather, either Jewishness or womanliness – seemed to disappear in twentiethcentury analyses of hysteria and its implications. As Ann Pellegrini has pointed out, in the hands of Jewish cultural historians like Sander Gilman, race and gender were treated as discrete categories, replicating the patterns of Freud’s original displacement (1997: 28). If all Jews are womanly – and the characterization of the schlemiel, which has been consistently applied to Woody Allen’s performing persona since Sig Altman published The Comic Image of the Jew in 1971, builds directly on and recuperates this stigmatization – then it is a complicated business for women to be seen as Jews. They – we – tend to be made visible in three different ways, all of which are evident in Allen’s work. The first is ‘as a Jewish man’ (Pellegrini 1997: 28), like Johansson’s Sondra in Scoop. The second is as the person who begets and can be held responsible for Jewishness, like Sadie Millstein in Oedipus Wrecks. The third option is for Jewishness to disappear altogether, to become a ‘whitened’ and presumably gentile woman (ibid.: 58). Here we return to those ‘just girls’ who infuriated Vivian Gornick while watching Allen’s movies back in the early 1970s.

Prototypes Louise Lasser, Allen’s second wife, participated in at least six of his film projects, occasionally uncredited. Although they had separated by the time

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Bananas (1971) was made, she played ‘the girl’, Nancy, deracinated to such an extent that in an essay for a collection on Jewish humour called Semites and Stereotypes, the character is urpily described as a ‘shiksa innocent’, albeit one with a ‘political and sexual head for heights’ (Freadman 1993: 111). Even though neither Nancy nor Allen’s character, Fielding Mellish, is identified as Jewish in the film, he has been consistently read as Jewish and she has not. This is remarkable when one considers their tonal balance, not unlike the one Allen establishes later with Julie Kavner. Nancy’s agency as well as her foolishness are co-established and on a par with Fielding’s own; despite her education, for instance, the only thing she has to say about Kierkegaard is that he’s Danish, while mindlessly reaffirming Fielding’s suggestion that the Eastern philosophy she seems to enthusiastically embrace is ‘pretentious’ and ‘redundant’. In a 2013 interview, Lasser said: That girl that he portrays, many of his characters … I think I was the original. The source for the others … I was one of those Jews who sort of denied her heritage, because I didn’t look it, no one thought I was Jewish … I was brought up to think […] it was inferior. I thought the way typical American Jews tend to think. (quoted in Barliant 2013)

According to Allen, Lasser was indeed his prototype girl: ‘In all my future writing over the years, she remained my blond lady of the sonnets’ (2020: 102). Hers is the Jewishness described by Marjorie Garber as a ‘spectral visibility’ (1999: 99). Lasser’s background mirrors that of Nancy in Bananas: she studied for a degree in political philosophy, for instance, although at Brandeis rather than City College. Nancy also shares biographical details with the character of Allison Porchnik, Alvy Singer’s first wife in Annie Hall (1977). When they first meet and Alvy finds out that Allison is working on a PhD on political commitment in twentieth-century literature, he launches straight in: ‘New York left-wing liberal intellectual Central Park West, Brandeis University’, ‘socialist summer camps’, ‘father with the Ben Shahn drawings’, ‘strike-oriented’. Allison, played by the Jewish actor Carol Kane, responds tartly: ‘That was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.’ The culture to which this stereotype is attached is upper middle class, urban Jewishness (a direct parallel of Ida Bauer’s fin de siècle Viennese version). Interestingly, Janet Margolin’s ‘girl’ character in Take the Money and Run (1969) – which was made before Bananas, while Lasser and Allen were still married – is called Louise. Margolin, who was also Jewish, played Alvy’s second ex-wife, Robin, in Annie Hall: fabulously stylish, beautiful, cultured and erudite, but ‘cold’ and social-climbing.

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Five years after Bananas was released, Lasser became a household name in the title role of the cult soap opera, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976–77). It is difficult to now convey just what a phenomenon this critique of capitalism and televised spectacle was back in 1976. Set in a small town in Ohio, Lasser as Mary – with childlike braids, doll-like mini-dresses and an inexplicable New York accent – plays a dazed housewife married to an autoworker. Her sister is a promiscuous wannabe country singer; her adolescent daughter hates her; grandpa is a pervert. Neighbours are murdered; family members are kidnapped; mirroring contemporary headlines, there’s a hostage crisis. At the end of the first season, Mary goes on live television to be interviewed as ‘America’s Number One Consumer Housewife’, thinking she’ll be asked to talk about her favourite cleaning products. She ends up revealing that her husband is impotent and having a nervous breakdown. At around the same time, Lasser experienced a kind of psychotic incident in a shop which led to an arrest for cocaine possession. She was sentenced to undergo therapy, which was fine by her because she had already been in analysis for over a decade by then. Indeed, it is one of the first things Lasser mentions when recounting her relationship with Allen (who is three years older than her): ‘We used to joke. I never wanted to do comedy, I was just a young actress, living with my parents, just started therapy’ (quoted in Barliant 2013). For his part, Allen stresses just how beautiful she was, as well as the wealth and cosmopolitanism of her parents, before adding: ‘She had a chesty voice, and carnal promise oozed out of every pore. She was also a little nuts.’ (2020: 97). While there is nothing overtly Jewish about the characters or environment of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Mary’s predicament uncannily resembles that of Ida Bauer’s mother – whom Freud decided was suffering from ‘housewives’ neurosis’ (Showalter 1993: 316) – with hints of his prognosis for Ida herself. Mary is presented as a hysteric who lacks sexual fulfilment, surrounded by chaos she is unable to control. Like so many Jewish woman, Lasser/Mary seemed to represent a kind of universal Womanhood – not unlike Marge Simpson, who had a similar breakdown in the episode ‘Homer Alone’ (1992). And then there is Lasser’s often commented upon husky voice: an ‘outlaw voice’ that is ‘slow, breathy, distinctive, the one you don’t know whether to laugh or cry at’ (Grossberger 1980: 50). The impulse to incorporate a breakdown scene for Mary, which mirrored Lasser’s own, arose when Lasser lost her voice (Barliant 2013), one of the traditional symptoms of hysteria. Paradoxically, it is when Lasser is playing a role that lacks almost all coding as Jewish that the Jewishness of her star text is both revealed and reinforced via gaps and silences. This is due to a combination of factors that

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include intertextual performativity, vocalic embodiment and the Jewishness of her performance training and experience. After leaving Brandeis, Lasser studied acting with Stanford Meisner (born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Hungary who ran a business in the New York garment district), whose technique revolves around the presence and intense observation of other performers in a given scene; she went on to teach Meisner’s technique for many years. Lasser was Barbra Streisand’s understudy in the Jewish-themed musical about the Manhattan clothing industry, I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962) and, in 1964, she performed in Elaine May’s revue, The Third Ear. A contemporary critic described Lasser as ‘a good ingénue’ with ‘blue‐eyed, pearly toothed demi-innocence’ and May as ‘the den mother of improvisation’ (The New York Times, 1964). Yearning for a scenario in which Jewishness is neither erased nor traumatic, I suggest that, by reading Jewish, we might be able to use Allen’s body of work as a nexus through which to identify and re-orientate a performative construction of Jewish womanhood that is confident, sexy, politically committed, self-fulfilled and intelligent. There is, of course, plenty of evidence in his films that such women are frightening and ultimately to be avoided if not scorned. It isn’t necessary to look far for a metaphoric reason why. In Manhattan, Allen’s character says that he once wrote a short story about his mother called ‘A Castrating Zionist’. In Oedipus Wrecks, Sadie Millstein’s gigantic head floating over New York is the embodiment of what Barbara Creed calls ‘the monstrous feminine’, a Freudian representation that terrifies through the threat of castration (1993: 7). In Bananas, Nancy attempts to calm Fielding’s anxiety after telling him that she attends a women’s liberation group by saying, ‘Oh, women’s rights do not automatically mean castration.’ It is therefore to the primal scene of the bedroom – in Allen’s visual vocabulary, the site of women’s agency and (so) male anxiety – that I choose to return in order to position the final scene of Bananas, in which Nancy and Fielding are in bed, starting their married life together, as an intertextual pivot. Despite – or, more accurately, because of – the slight disappointment Nancy expresses in their lovemaking to the on-hand sports commentator, Howard Cossell (and foreshadowing Sadie Millstein’s public pronouncements), I want to imagine a future for them together: a life of mutual acceptance and ageing without nervous breakdowns and bitter separations. And so, some 45 years later in real time – and yet, only about three years earlier in fictional time – we end up in the suburban 1960s bedroom of Kay and Sidney Munsinger, played by Elaine May and Woody Allen. This is because May, as Kay in Crisis in Six Scenes (2016), is simultaneously the

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progenitor and descendant of Louise Lasser’s Nancy. Like Fielding and Nancy, it is never explicitly stated that Sidney and Kay are Jewish – and yet, they could be nothing but. Crisis in Six Scenes is a six-part television series made by Allen for Amazon in 2016. It has been largely critically panned as both lazy and out-of-touch (see, for instance, Dziewir n.d.; Goodman 2016), although never due to the contribution of Elaine May, who hadn’t performed for over 15 years prior to its filming (in fact, not since Allen’s movie Small Time Crooks in 2000). May and Allen are both over 80 and playing about ten years younger. Unused to seeing elder couples that are both active and at the centre of the action on screen, their performing bodies are captivating. May seems to be frail and suffering from some sort of muscular paralysis that is cunningly disguised by the bottle of white wine she carries around most of the time. Yet her character drags Allen’s cowardly Sidney into a madcap adventure; she is a professional woman (still working as a marriage counsellor), a grandmother, a liberal. As she says of Miley Cyrus’ character, Lennie, an activist on the run: ‘She’s for all the right things. She’s for peace, she’s for Blacks, she’s for the rights of women.’ While they do bicker, Kay is not the cause nor is she symbolic of Sidney’s existential angst. May and Allen go back a long way together. Allen’s long-term manager and executive producer, Jack Rollins, was already managing her creative partnership with Mike Nichols when Rollins first talent-spotted Allen. In 1995 and 2011, Allen and May collaborated as playwrights on anthologies of three one-act plays (the former of which included Honeymoon Motel) with David Mamet and Ethan Coen respectively, both of whom are also Jewish. According to Allen, he had asked her to perform in Take the Money and Run, but she brushed him off. He describes May as ‘one of the very few people who is authentically funny’ (2020: 283). May comes from a theatrical family and was touring and performing on stage in her father’s Yiddish theatre company from the age of three;7 she also appeared with him in a radio parody of Fanny Brice’s famous Baby Snooks character (Coleman 1990: 38). May began working with Mike Nichols (who was also Jewish) in 1957 in Chicago, as members of the improvisational company The Compass Players. According to one of its founders, Compass’ unscripted material relied on the life experiences of its members – that is, ‘the tyranny of the middle class Jewish family’ 7 According to the film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, there is reason to believe that this, as well as other widely accepted biographical detail about May, is not entirely true (see Zoladz 2019).

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(McCrohan 1987: 31). When Compass disbanded, Nichols and May put together a touring nightclub act and by 1960 they were on Broadway, the toast of the town. Their sketches were all based on ‘scenes’ or ‘situations’, and none of their scripts were written down. Nevertheless, many were repeated and some were captured on film or record. One of the best-known of them features Nichols as a scientist, busy launching a rocket, who phones his mother played by May. She hasn’t eaten in three days waiting for him to call, afraid she’ll have food in her mouth when the time comes. ‘I feel awful’, says Nichols. ‘Oh god’, replies May, ‘if only I could believe that, I’d be the happiest mother in the world.’ Apparently, both of their mothers thought they recognized the other one in that sketch. According to Lawrence Epstein, Nichols and May’s verbal play extended a Yiddish comedy tradition that valued ‘both self-mockery and mockery of the powerful’ (2001: xiii), and this particular routine transforms a standard Jewish immigrant comic piece by putting the mother onstage with a voice that is powerful, if intrusive. Epstein suggests ambivalently that this is a woman who, deprived by gendered expectations from finding her ‘true self’, had become ‘bitter and needy’ (181–182). Prior to becoming hard-baked into a less sympathetic, easy stereotype over the following decades, the Jewish Mother and Son who emerged from Nichols and May’s observational comedy continued to echo in Sadie and Sheldon’s relationship in Oedipus Wrecks, 25 years later. In 2014, in the New Yorker, Nathan Heller reflected on listening to Nichols and May in his grandparents’ record collection. He notes the ‘brilliance of May’s comic timing’ and the innovation of what he calls their ‘verbiage’, which ‘had already become clichéd from the lips of an over psychoanalyzed cohort’. Heller suggests that ‘the duo was successful because it brought humour to a mid-century boom in education and the upper-middle-brow, New Sentimental-style striving that ensued. This is the comic-midcult yammer of a hundred Woody Allen movies’. It is precisely this adult, urban(e) conversation style, located indeterminately and yet knowingly between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ cultures, that we hear in the wonderful ‘break up’ scene between Nancy and Fielding in Bananas – the one that leads Fielding to accidentally join the revolutionary fighters of San Marcos (and so, eventually, to the couple’s reconciliation). According to Lasser, it was entirely improvised (Barliant 2013). Her restrained and seemingly hesitant delivery both belies and underscores the recognizable urgency of a woman who has psyched herself up to end a relationship honestly but with as little conflict as possible.

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Lasser and Allen are attending closely while speaking over each other, playing with rhythm and tone, and creating spaces together within a spiralling structure for barely acknowledged (often doubled) punchlines: Nancy: The relationship isn’t going anywhere. Well, where do you want to it go? Fielding: Well, where could we get it to go? Nancy: Fielding: That’s not […] l don’t know where. l love you. l mean, l love you and you love me. That’s a, that’s a … Nancy: No. And it’s not because l don’t love you. Fielding: I… Then you love me? Nancy: No, l don’t […] You’re immature, Fielding. Fielding: How am l immature? Nancy: Well, emotionally, sexually and intellectually. Fielding: Yeah, but what other ways? Nancy: Well then, maybe it’s my fault. Maybe l just can’t give. Fielding: What do you mean, you can’t give? Then why don’t you receive and l’ll give? Nancy: l’m not ready to receive. (Bananas, 1971)

While it is possible to discern Lasser’s Meisner training in this scene – in particular, the focus on doing rather than affective memory as in ‘method acting’, to make ‘authentic’, in-the-moment creative choices – equally evident is the improvisational influence of the ‘neurotically gendered tag team’ (Doherty 2007: 2) of Nichols and May. Julian Meyers and Jill Dawsey discuss Pauline Kael’s identification of a ‘Nichols-and-May’ style of comedy in terms that are especially apt here. This is a style that is reliant on a ‘rhythm of clichés, defenses, and little verbal aggressions’ and ‘depends on the pulse and the intuition of the performers’. They reference May’s ‘special, distracted comic tone, which implies you can’t always tell what’s funny’ (Kael quoted in Meyers 2009), a vocal description that could equally apply to Lasser. In casting Elaine May as his wife in Crisis in Six Scenes, Allen is citing a performance history and influence that is already woven into the fabric of his film work and celebrating a sharp, unapologetically smart Jewish woman performer. Recognizing this, however, is not without some discomfort, since the major object of Allen’s critique in the series is the political naivety of characters, including Kay, who fall under the sway of charismatic activists

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and radical dogma (just like Nancy in Bananas). One way of negotiating this ‘dis-ease’ is to refuse Allen’s moral(izing) perspective, to lovingly accept rather than ridicule, for instance, the members of Kay’s book club. With their big wigs and leopard fur coats, when we meet these older women in the first episode, they are confusing Oedipus with Hercules. By the final episode, they are discussing hand-to-hand combat and guerrilla warfare, planning a revolution that begins by taking over the press and government. ‘I’m Rita Needleman’, says one obviously Jewish woman to camera – again, it’s all in the name (Mr. and Mrs. Needleman are the childhood neighbours whose story features in the opening scene of Radio Days) – ‘but you can call me by my new name, Rita Mohammed.’ Made in the year that Donald Trump was elected president and set about dismantling women’s rights while fomenting anti-Semitism, anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, May as Kay becomes a role model for the political awakening, radical potential and increased visibility of elderly Jewish women. It was also a role that reawakened May’s late-stage career and prompted a reconsideration of her star text. Despite being one of the only women directors working in Hollywood in the 1970s and 1980s, May had been a diff icult f igure for second-wave feminists to embrace, due to both her self-erasure (removing her name from credits, for instance) and the ‘caustic tone’ of movies in which the portrayal of women is as ‘derisory’ as that of men (Zoladz 2019). Since her appearance in Crisis in Six Scenes, it has become commonplace to describe hers as a career destroyed by gendered ‘double standards’ and to express anger that May had been punished for being ‘difficult’ and for the box office failure of Ishtar (1987), the last movie she directed, when numerous high-profile male directors (including both Nichols and Allen) were routinely offered ‘second chances’ (see, for example, Courogen 2019). Perhaps as signif icantly, Crisis in Six Scenes set in motion and foreshadowed May’s return to the Broadway stage as a performer for the first time in over 50 years. In 2019, at the age of 87, she won her first Tony Award for her performance in Kenneth Lonergan’s play, The Waverly Gallery, as the matriarch of a clan of ‘liberal Upper West Side atheistic Jewish intellectuals’ who are slipping into dementia. One critic described May’s controlled performance of deterioration as ‘absolutely and terrifyingly real, fully embodied rather than merely acted’ (Soloski 2018), leading one to question to what extent her apparent fragility as Kay Munsinger had actually been the product of excellent technique established over a long career rather than primarily the manifestation of a body in decline.

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In this essay, I have attempted to identify and confront the interlocking forms and causes for my anxiety when engaging with Woody Allen’s work. These include jokey references in his scripts to the sexual abuse of minors and the normalization of predatory behaviour toward young women, both of which are inevitably informed by knowledge of his own relationships and allegations against him; his dated caricaturing of Jewish mothers as unredemptively monstrous; and his presentation of explicitly Jewish women as undesirable while often occluding the Jewishness of those who are positioned as attractive and loveable. As Dederer observed, while all of this is ‘kinda gross’, it can also be true that Allen’s work has ‘a lot of things about it that are pretty great’ (2017). For me, these things largely have to do with the women who are performing in it – in particular, the authenticity with which they are still able to speak to me as a North American Jewish woman. My primary focus in this chapter, therefore, has been located in the intersection of Jewish female characters – most of which are offered limited scope or space for depth of self-expression – and the Jewish actors who play them, and to embrace a sense of disorienting ambivalence as the starting point for potentially recuperative readings. This has meant reading both with and against the narratives and associations Allen has constructed, occasionally interpreting them in ways he almost certainly did not intend. In doing so, I have been led by the Jewish philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous’ 1976 exhortation, drawing on the case study of Freud’s Dora, for women to write their selves with their bodies into history and through their history. Rather than a wholesale ‘death of the author’ repudiation of the uncontaminated, pure, self-contained text, I have employed a process of meaningmaking based on affect, genealogies and alternative perspectives. Such a methodology, which also embraces spectatorial pleasure and imagination, considers a range of biographies that exploit the conflation of staged roles and professional history. A single performance contains within it a history of performances – by the actor, and those who preceded her – each of which includes various processes of coding, decoding and recoding. This chapter has also shown, however, how readings of such performances defy chronological linearity: in particular, how the intertextual vocalic ghosts of Jewish women haunt and so enrich understandings of the others in specific performances that connect rhizomatically across their star texts. Thus, one of the ways we can begin to negotiate the dis-ease of engaging with Woody Allen’s work is by recognizing, celebrating and centring the women, together and separately, whose careers and presence co-constitute and author the roles they play in it.

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Bibliography Allen, Woody. (2020). Apropos of Nothing, New York: Arcade Publishing; EPUB. —. (2013). Honeymoon Motel. In Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen, Relatively Speaking. New York: Dramatists Play Service, pp. 43–60. Altman, Sig. (1971). The Comic Image of the Jew: Explorations of a Pop Culture Phenomenon. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Barliant, Claire. (2018). An Interview with Louise Lasser: TV, Depression, and SNL. The Toast, 20 December 2013: http://the-toast.net/2013/12/20/an-interview-withlouise-lasser-tv-depression-snl-and-woody/ Accessed: 11 January, 2020. Bial, Henry. (2005). Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Cadwalladr, Carole. (2014). Scarlett Johansson interview: ‘I would way rather not have middle ground’. The Observer, 16 March 2014: https://www.theguardian. com/film/2014/mar/16/scarlett-johansson-interview-middle-ground-underthe-skin-sodastream Accessed: 3 November, 2020. Cixous, Hélène. (1976/1980). The Laugh of the Medusa. Trans. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. In Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Eds.), New French Feminisms. Brighton: Harvester, pp 245–64. Coleman, Janet. (1990). The Compass: The Improvisational Theatre That Revolutionized American Comedy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Connor, Steven. (2000). Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Courogen, Carrie. (2019). Decades Later, the World Is Catching Up to Elaine May. Glamour, 4 November 2019: https://www.glamour.com/story/elaine-may-profile (Accessed: 5 August 2020). Creed, Barbara. (1993). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. De Vries, Hilary. (2020). Darling! Listen to Me. New York Times, 26 January 1992: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/26/magazine/darling-listen-to-me.html 8 July. Dederer, Claire. (2017). What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? Paris Review, 20 November 2017: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/ art-monstrous-men/ 1 December. Del Negro, Giovanna P. (2014). Woody’s Women: Jewish Domesticity and the Unredeemed Ghost of Hanukkah to Come. In Vincent Brook and Marat Grinberg (Eds.), Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, pp. 143–170. Doherty, Thomas. (2007). Taking Humor Seriously Without Being Glum. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 January 2007: https://www.chronicle.com/ article/taking-humor-seriouslywithout-being-glum 17 August.

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Duggan, Patrick. (2017). Unsettling the Audience: Affective ‘Dis-ease’ and the Politics of Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary Performance. Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, 15, pp. 40–54. Dziewir, Jordan. (2021). Television Review: Crisis in Six Scenes. Novella: https:// novellamag.com/television-review-crisis-in-six-scenes/ 31 January. Epstein, Lawrence. (2001). The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America. New York: Public Affairs. Farrow, Dylan. (2018). Dylan Farrow: Why has the #MeToo revolution spared Woody Allen? LA Times, 7 December 2017: http://beta.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/ la-oe-farrow-woody-allen-me-too-20171207-story.html 5 January. Freadman, Richard. (1993). Love among the Stereotypes, or Why Woody’s Women Leave. In Avner Ziv and Anat Zajdman (Eds.), Semites and Stereotypes: Characteristics of Jewish Humor. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Garber, Marjorie. (1999). Symptoms of Culture. London: Penguin. Gilman, Sander. (1991). The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge. Goodman, Tim. (2021). Crisis in Six Scenes: TV Review. Hollywood Reporter, 26 September 2016: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/crisis-sixscenes-review-932372 31 January. Gornick, Vivian. (1989). Twice an Outsider: On being Jewish and a Woman. Tikkun, 4, March/April, pp. 29–31 and 123–125. Grossberger, Lewis. (1980). Funny Things Happen to Louise Lasser. New York, 28 January, pp. 49–52. Haithman, Diane. (2018). Julie Kavner: A Private Person in Many Roles. Los Angeles Times, 15 June 1989: http://articles.latimes.com/1989-06-15/entertainment/ ca-2655_1_character-actress-tracey-ullman-show-sara-lee 2 January. Heller, Nathan. (2018). Learning How to Talk like Nichols and May. New Yorker, 24 November 2014: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/ learning-talk-like-nichols-may 3 January. Ickes, Bob. (2997). Marge Attacks! New York Magazine, 30(10), 17 March. Jones, Chris. (2018). Scarlett Johansson…That Voice. Esquire (first published February 2005), 7 October 2013: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/ a32552/esq0205scarlett-64/ 20 October. Kahane, Claire. (1985). Introduction: Part 2. In Charles Berneimer and Claire Kahane (Eds.), In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 19–32. Lane, Anthony. (2018). Her Again: The unstoppable Scarlett Johansson. New Yorker, 17 March 2014: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/24/her-again 1 November. McCrohan, Donna. (1987). The Second City: A Backstage History of Comedy’s Hottest Troupe. New York: Perigee Books.

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Meyers, Julian. (2018). Four Dialogues 4: On Elaine May. Open Space, 28 August 2009: https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2009/08/four-dialogues-4-on-elaine-may/ 11 January. Mumford, Gwilym. (2017). Woody Allen forced to clarify comments about ‘sad’ Harvey Weinstein. Guardian, 16 October 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2017/oct/16/harvey-weinstein-woody-allen-sad-comment-sexual-abuseallegations 6 July. New York Times (2020). ‘Third Ear’ Opens at Premise Theater; New Production Staged by Elaine May; Renee Taylor Excels in Company of 5. 29 May 1964: https://www. nytimes.com/1964/05/29/archives/third-ear-opens-at-premise-theater-newproduction-staged-by-elaine.html Accessed: 20 August, 2020. Pellegrini, Ann. (1997). Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race. London: Routledge. Ravits, Martha A. (2000). The Jewish Mother: Comedy and Controversy in American Popular Culture. MELUS. 25(1) Spring, 3–31. Schwadron, Hannah. (2018). The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, & Jewish Joke-work in U.S. Pop Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Showalter, Elaine. (1993). Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender. In Sander Gilman et al., Hysteria beyond Freud. Berkeley: University of California Press. Soloski, Alexis. (2018). The Waverly Gallery review – Elaine May dazzles in devastating dementia drama. Guardian, 26 October 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2018/oct/25/the-waverly-gallery-review-elaine-may-dazzles-in-devastatingdementia-drama 14 August. Taylor, Diana. (2003). The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Whittaker, Tom. (2017). Woody’s Spanish ‘Double’: Vocal Performance, Ventriloquism, and the Sound of Dubbing. In Tom Whittaker and Sarah Wright (Eds.), Locating the Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Practices. New York: Oxford University Press. Zoladz, Lindsay. (2020). Heaven Can Wait: The Hidden Genius of Elaine May. The Ringer, 14 March 2019: https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2019/3/14/18245240/ elaine-may-life-career-mike-ishtar-nichols-mikey-and-nicky-heartbreak-kida-new-leaf 12 August.

Filmography Annie Hall. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1977 Bananas. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1971 Crisis in Six Scenes. [Television]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Amazon Studios/ Gravier Productions. 2016

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Deconstructing Harry. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Sweetland Films/ Jean Doumanian Productions. 1997 Don’t Drink the Water. [Television]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Jean Doumanian Productions/Magnolia Productions/Sweetland Films. 1994 Funny Girl. [DVD]. Directed by William Wyler. USA: Rastar. 1968 Hannah and Her Sisters. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions. 1986 Her. [DVD]. Directed by Spike Jonze. USA: Annapurna Pictures. 2013 Interiors. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions. 1978 Ishtar. [DVD]. Directed by Elaine May. USA: Delphi V Productions. 1987 ‘Like Mother’. [Television]. Directed by Harvey Miller. The Tracey Ullman Show, Season 1 Episode 4 (4W01), first broadcast 26 August. 1987 Lost in Translation. [DVD]. Directed by Sofia Coppola. USA: American Zoetrope/ Elemental Films. 2003 Manhattan. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions. 1979 Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. [Television]. USA: Filmways/ T.A.T. Communications Company. 1976-1977 Match Point. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. UK: BBC Films/Thema Production/ Jada Productions. 2005 New York Stories. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese. dirs. USA: Touchstone Pictures/Silver Screen Partners IV/American Zoetrope. 1989 Play It Again, Sam. [DVD]. Directed by Herbert Ross. USA: APJAC Productions. 1972 Radio Days. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions/Orion Pictures. 1987 Rhoda. [Television]. USA: MTM Enterprises. 1974-1978 Scoop. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. UK/USA: BBC Films/Ingenious Film. 2006 Shadows and Fog. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Orion Pictures. 1991 The Simpsons. [Television]. USA: Gracie Films/20th Television. 1989–present Sleeper. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions. 1973 Small Time Crooks. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Sweetland Films. 2000 Take the Money and Run. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: ABC Pictures/ Palomar Pictures International. 1969 The Tracey Ullman Show. [Television]. USA: Gracie Films/20th Century Fox Television. 1987–1990 Vicky Cristina Barcelona. [DVD]. Directed by Woody Allen. Spain/Germany: Mediapro/Wild Bunch. 2008

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About the Author Roberta Mock is Professor of Performance Studies and Director of the Doctoral College at the University of Plymouth. Her research focuses on Jewishness, gender and sexuality in performance, particularly in stand-up comedy and performance art. She is the author of Jewish Women on Stage, Film and Television.

Part 4 Sound and Body

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The Silent (Film) Woman Sweet and Lowdown’s Mute Muse Steven Rawle Abstract This paper examines the absence of the female voice and Morton’s nostalgic performance style to explore the ways in which Hattie is at once a problematic inclusion in Allen’s cinema and a romanticization of the female performances of silent cinema. Woody Allen’s cinema is primarily def ined through its dialogue rather than its visual or sonic qualities. Similarly, Allen’s female characters are often defined through talk or through the quality of their voices. In some regard, therefore, Samantha Morton’s performance as Hattie in Sweet and Lowdown (1999) is something of an anomaly in Allen’s oeuvre as a lead female character who does not speak. Keywords: silent film, voice, performance

Claire Dederer’s Paris Review blog, ‘What Do We Do with the Arts of Monstrous Men?’ (2017), raises several pertinent questions of the difficulty of consuming work by male artists whose crimes or moral transgressions are public knowledge and how difficult it becomes to continue to praise their work. As she says, the ‘awful thing disrupts the great work’. The piece discusses how Dederer felt ‘betrayed’ by Woody Allen’s affair with Soon-Yi Previn and how the subsequent allegations involving Dylan Farrow produced ‘elemental’ feelings in her. Dederer talks subsequently about revisiting Allen’s work, of paying to watch Annie Hall (1977), and how she experiences a lack of fairness in having to give up something she sees as ‘the greatest comic film of the twentieth century’, but watching Manhattan (1979) feels so transformed by what came after and she concludes that ‘its pro-girl anti-woman story would be upsetting even if Hurricane Soon-Yi had never made landfall, but

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we can’t know, and there lies the very heart of the matter’. Dederer cannot approach the work without its history, without the accumulative biographical knowledge that makes re-watching or paying for the work feel immoral: ‘What do I do about the monster? Do I have a responsibility either way? To turn away, or to overcome my biographical distaste and watch, or read, or listen?’ On a related topic, Ryan Gilbey speculated (2018) that the auteur theory’s adherence to the centrality and the cult of the director (even more so the writer-director) may be consigned to history after the revelation of Harvey Weinstein’s crimes, other abuses or crimes committed by directors (some in the production of revered f ilms) or the idiotically insensitive comments of male directors in response to the #MeToo movement. Margaret Leclere echoes this in her piece about the death of the auteur in the #MeToo age: ‘it’s perhaps time for a new theory’ (2018: ??). Dederer notes that her male friends would defend Manhattan from criticisms: ‘“You must judge Manhattan on its aesthetics!” they said.’ If we defend Manhattan on its aesthetics (understanding aesthetics as referring to the construction of its images), the auteur theory demands they be attributed to Allen, not to Gordon Willis, the cinematographer who shot the film. The auteur theory’s development as an evaluative tool to create lists of valued directors by its adherents (see Sarris 1968) ‘denigrates everyone else’s job’, as Gilbey quotes the director Fred Schepisi. The presence of collections such as this one continues to emphasize how the auteur still persists in structuring readings of work and the attribution of meaning to a single source. This must now be considered as inclusive of contributions of a range of other authors – of an ‘authorial collective’, in Paul Sellors’ term – who reflect ‘that films are collaborative enterprises and that authors are facts of film production’ (2010: 130). Film production has authorial collectives (including a composer or performers but not necessarily a grip or electrician), and the ‘writing’ of a work is conducted by more than a single individual. This notion of ‘writing’ is an important aspect of the approach of this chapter. A text is, as Barthes described it, ‘a multi-dimensional space’ (1978: 146) where the expressions of a multitude of collaborators collide. This is not simply to see the text as ‘the tissue of quotations’ but a document inscribed with the labour of multiple individuals. In some regards, this might be a way to ‘overcome my [own] biographical distaste’, but it also offers a space in which the contribution of other authors of the work is promoted at least alongside that of the writer-director. This chapter looks at a film that has received little attention in Allen’s back catalogue – perhaps because it is difficult to place within a biographical frame of reference, given that it does not have the typical Allen persona at its heart – but that features a female character

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who was both controversial at the time and atypical in Allen’s oeuvre, 1999’s Sweet and Lowdown and Samantha Morton’s performance as Hattie, the mute muse of this chapter’s title. I argue therefore that the authorship of the character must lay significantly in its embodiment by Morton, aside from only in its screenplay, largely because Hattie falls outside the typical female characters of Allen’s cinema as one who is mute – a departure from Allen’s regular concern for women who portray themselves through their speech. The impulse is to understand Hattie as a female character who is ‘flattened’, reduced to an image, voiceless, although Morton’s performance is more dynamic than this. Sweet and Lowdown was released in 1999, based on a script written in the 1960s, The Jazz Baby, intended as a follow-up to Take the Money and Run (1969) (Bjorkman 1995). Allen had seemingly wanted to play the central role of Emmet Ray, the world’s second-best jazz guitarist, a forgotten icon of the 1930s. When the film was revived in the 1990s, the lead role was played by Sean Penn, in a performance unlike many others in Allen’s films in the 1990s and 2000s, where lead actors often mimicked the performance style of Allen’s own onscreen persona. As will be discussed later, however, this did not necessarily distance the film from traditional auteurist readings of the connection between the work and its author, although Penn’s performance is assured in a way unseen in some other leading roles from this period of Allen’s career. It’s telling here that Sweet and Lowdown was released hot on the heels of two more nakedly autobiographical films – 1997’s Deconstructing Harry, with Allen in the central role and Robin Williams playing a fictionalized version of Allen’s character who literally ends up out of focus while filming, and 1998’s Celebrity in which Kenneth Branagh plays the central Allen-esque role – both of which seemed more angry about a life infamously lived in the limelight, as Allen had done since the early 1990s. Celebrity also carries with it a great deal of baggage in hindsight as a product of Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax and featuring a cameo by Donald Trump. Stephanie Zacharek, at Salon, called it ‘facile and bitterly misogynist’ (1999). Sweet and Lowdown, at least on first viewing, seems to stand apart from these two films. In this chapter I am mainly concerned with one of the supporting roles in Sweet and Lowdown, Samantha Morton’s Hattie, the mute laundress that Emmet meets (and abandons). Morton’s performance was a breakthrough role – she was nominated for an Oscar – and a break in terms of process. As her character had no dialogue, Allen allowed her to read the whole script before production, whereas other actors are only permitted to read their own dialogue (Zacharek 1999). Much of the critical reception of the

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film concerned her performance (Penn was also nominated for an Oscar, but his contribution attracted much less attention), both positively and negatively. I want to attend to some of that reception, particularly because it so implicates an auteurist reading of the work but also the ways in which it is balanced with praise for Morton’s role, because it seems like such a standout in Allen’s work. As Zacharek mused, ‘I suspect when I look back on Sweet and Lowdown in 10 years’ time, I’ll remember it as belonging solely to Morton.’ It’s difficult to disagree with Zacharek 20 years later.1 Sweet and Lowdown is a faux quasi-documentary about the life of Emmet Ray and his misadventures. In a similar fashion to Zelig (1983), the film is punctuated with interviews from ‘experts’ and enthusiasts – including Allen, Douglas McGrath, Susan Jillian and journalist Nat Hentoff – who talk up the myth and legend of Ray and his exploits. The film is a more conventional comedy-drama than the earlier film, despite these interventions. It also shares affinities with the episodic structure of Radio Days (1987), while the central story corresponds clearly with that of Fellini’s La Strada (1954), Emmet replacing Zampanò and Hattie standing in for Gelsomina. Ray is set up as a great jazz guitarist whose talent was only rivalled by that of his idol, Django Reinhardt. So revered was Reinhardt by Ray that he would faint in his presence. In one anecdote, we hear that Ray had even fled a performance when he believed, after a prank played by his bandmates, that Reinhardt was in the audience. Yet, his potential was blighted by his personal life of racketeering, womanizing and drinking. Several times in the film, he takes women to watch him at his favourite pastime, shooting rats at train yards. This is both how he meets Hattie and where the film ends. He goes on a double date with one of the members of his band and meets Hattie, who comes along with her friend. Although Emmet is dismissive of her and treats her harshly, they develop a close relationship. She listens adoringly to his music and has a rapacious sexual appetite. When Emmet travels to Hollywood to feature in a short, Hattie is discovered by a director and embarks upon a film career. Emmet leaves her, convinced that a relationship with just one woman is not becoming of his stature. He marries Blanche (Uma Thurman), a wealthy socialite who’s enamoured with Emmet’s roughness and working-class edge – she writes about him in her work, and 1 Morton herself looks back on the f ilm’s production fondly. When she was asked about working with Allen in 2019 after a number of stars had expressed their regret about working with him, she said she had only positive memories of him being ‘kind, funny, and wonderful to work with’, and while she, as a survivor of sexual abuse, had sympathy for anyone who accuses someone of abuse, she couldn’t ‘now go back’ to change anything (Miller 2019).

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he becomes her muse just as Hattie was for him. Blanche then embarks on an affair with a mafioso (Anthony LaPaglia), and Emmet leaves her in search of Hattie, whom he has been dreaming about. To his regret, he finds her happily married with a family. Yet Emmet continues to pine for Hattie. He smashes his guitar in fury when he plays a tune for another woman that Hattie had enjoyed. Nevertheless, at the climax of the film, we’re told that Ray achieved greatness in the following years, presumably inspired by the loss of Hattie, a greatness that was only transcended by his hero Django. The final shot proper of the film (excluding the final interview segments) mimics that of La Strada, as cinematographer Zhao Fei’s final shot cranes up and away from the protagonist slumped against a telegraph pole with his guitar smashed around him.

The Quality of Voice Allen’s cinema is primarily defined through its dialogue rather than its visual or sonic qualities. Similarly, Allen’s female characters are often defined through talk or through the quality of their voices. This is certainly the case in the two films that Dederer revisited, both featuring Diane Keaton. In some regard, therefore, Morton’s performance as Hattie as a lead female character who does not speak is something of an anomaly in Allen’s oeuvre. As Peter Bailey argues in The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (2016), Hattie emphasizes not Allen’s misogyny but his approach to audiences who consume the work of artists. Roger Ebert (1999) suggested, in his review of the film, that she is not Allen’s ‘ideal woman’. He dismissed criticisms of the character as ‘psychobabble’ and resorted to autobiography to understand the figure of Hattie: Allen’s real-life partners, from Louise Lasser through Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow to the Soon-Yi Previn seen in the 1998 documentary ‘Wild Man Blues’, have all been assertive and verbal. I think Hattie is seen as Emmet’s ideal woman, not Woody’s. (1999)

What stands out here, whilst again the auteurist reading is inescapable, is not just his dismissal of accusations of misogyny but the placement of the character within a longer trajectory of Allen’s cinema, within a body of female characters that have been characterized by their vocality. If we think about the key female characters in Allen’s cinema, they are all verbal and sometimes to a degree that is implicitly criticized. Notwithstanding

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Ebert’s dismissal of legitimate criticisms of the figure of the mute woman in Allen’s cinema, the voiceless woman as a leading character is far from a recurring feature. Sharon Stone’s short appearance in Stardust Memories (1980) as a metaphorical image of glamour on a train comes to mind as an analogous figure, but one whose role is never developed. In the context of a cinema defined by talk, however, Hattie is a standout. Yet the anomalous standing of Hattie in Allen’s work does beg more exploration in relation to psychoanalytical dimensions of the displacement of women’s voices by cinema and in terms of that particular lost object. While Hattie might be read as a conventional reduction of woman to image, she also represents a form of nostalgia for the performances of silent cinema. It is notable, of course, that at one point in the story she also stars in a film. Hattie thus represents both a lost object of cinema, but also her own loss of voice that problematizes her standing both in Allen’s cinema and in the reception of the film. We will return to dimensions of the voice later in the chapter and will subsequently examine both the absence of the female voice and Morton’s nostalgic performance style to look at the ways in which Hattie is at once a problematic inclusion in Allen’s cinema and a romanticization of the female performances of silent cinema. Yet it is important to continue this consideration of the film’s reception to look at those reviews dismissed by Ebert as ‘psychobabble’.

Voice and Comfort Zacharek expressed some of the immediate concerns in approaching Hattie’s character in her review: ‘A mute laundress? Could any character sound more sickly and unappealing from that description?’ (1999). Nevertheless, her review is unequivocal in its praise for Morton’s performance: ‘it’s her face that really gets you’. The reference to the face echoes Roland Barthes’ treatise on the face of Garbo, just one of the reflections of silent cinema in the performance of Morton: ‘the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced’, an idea rather than the ‘event’ of the ‘individualised’ Audrey Hepburn (1993: 56). When Hattie first hears Emmet play ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, the camera drifts toward her face, unseen by Emmet as she changes in the bathroom, capturing her rapture at his playing. She embodies the concept of music, not its technical qualities but its affect. Here, the face is Deleuze’s reactive surface of the affection-image (2001), the completed circuit between work of art and audience, and in post-structural terms, one is nothing without

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the other. For Zacharek, Morton is ‘both the glowing presence of great silent-film actresses like Lillian Gish and the crushing vulnerability of Giulietta Masina… [She] is music you can see’ (1999). Zacharek’s review captures both the distaste for the trope of the character, particularly in context, but also the transcendence of Morton’s performance. In some respects, this demonstrates an ability to step outside the auteurist reading of the work and to highlight the ‘writing’ of performance that elevates the trope to something more. Other reviews problematized the uncomfortable presence of the mute muse. While to some degree we might read Hattie as the moral centre of the film around which Emmet misogynistically self-destructs, the very absence of her voice took on a more significant dimension for some reviewers. Lisa Schwarzbaum, in Entertainment Weekly, perhaps half-jokingly took the opportunity to situate the presence of Hattie in proximity to Allen’s public life. In an otherwise positive review, she asks why: … the woman Ray loves truest is an enthralled mute who’s as simply satisfied as an adopted child, demanding nothing more than a sandwich and a shred of attention? Soon-Yi, honey, Morton carries off the premise because she’s capable of wordless eloquence, but for pity’s sake, don’t let your husband get away with all that jazz. (1999: ??)

Schwarzbaum f inds it impossible to dissociate the f ilm from its writer-director: Sweet and Lowdown vibrates madly with charged autobiographical ions. This second-greatest-artist-who-worships-Django, created by the director who worships Ingmar Bergman, is praised in the end as a complicated genius whose mature work is his best; this exasperating music maker, with his untidy personal life, is absolved for being true to himself.

Likewise, Amy Taubin, in a review published originally in The Village Voice, positioned the film as a form of semi-autobiographical text when she called it ‘a wish-fulfilment fan-tasy about the kind of artist Allen could be if he were not a celebrity’ (2006). Given the film’s proximity to Celebrity seemingly as a working through of a personal life lived in the limelight, it is difficult not to see the film as a wish to have ‘faded away’ like Emmet is said to have done. If we contextualize Taubin’s statements close to those of Schwarzbaum, the hyphenated fan-tasy is more telling in its relationship with Allen’s own fan

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worship of Bergman. It is a compelling autuerist reading and one that, for Taubin, is bound with the figure of Hattie: Sweet and Lowdown combines the talking-jag rhythms of ’30s comedies with the physical humor of the silent era. The Chaplinesque Ray’s main squeeze is a mute laundress; the talented British actress Samantha Morton plays her like a cross between Harpo Marx and Mary Pickford. Though Morton never cloys, Allen’s misogyny vis-à-vis this character is so blatant that it almost defies mention. (She’s beautiful, she’s adoring, she can’t talk back.) Uma Thurman fares worse as a femme fatale whose vanity matches Emmet’s own, and the huge supporting cast is indistinguishable from the furniture. Sweet and Lowdown is too slight to accommodate more than one ego – a larger-than-life model of the filmmaker’s own.

The Audience Again, this functions as a form of wish fulfilment but also assumes a form of passivity for Hattie that I think is it at odds with her characterization, something to which I’ll return. I also want to return to Uma Thurman’s character Blanche, who in terms of vocalization offers something of a contrast to Hattie. At this stage, it’s worth noting the split we’ve seen so far in gender terms between reviewers. Ebert’s ‘psychobabble’ comment seems problematically dismissive in this context. Jonathan Romney’s review in The New Statesman reflected on a different contrast, this time between Hattie and Gretchen Mol’s appearance at the end of the film. After finally opening up to Hattie only to find she’s now happily married with a child, Emmet meets Mol’s character in a bar and takes her to the train tracks, where he enjoys watching the freight trains. When he plays the tune that so enthralled Hattie (‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’), he finds this new love interest is unmoved: he smashes his guitar in disgust. ‘I made a mistake’, he screams three times over. Romney frames this in terms of the audience: Largely thanks to Morton’s nuanced and totally wordless performance, we can be touched by the character of Hattie, even while being embarrassed by the sentimental Chaplin-era image of the mute, understanding muse. The film ends with a disgruntled flapper uncomprehendingly shrugging at Emmet’s heartbreaking brilliance, where soulful Hattie would have swooned over it. The two women, in Allen’s worldview, are complementary

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opposites: faced with true artistry, a girl either gets it and admires, or she doesn’t and looks a fool. (2000)

Romney’s comments here suggest a clear distinction between Morton-asperformer and Allen-as-auteur. The two are in some sense at odds: Morton transcends the material, while Allen condescends. Peter Bailey frames this more positively in his exploration of the film: A few reviewers of Sweet and Lowdown interpreted Hattie’s muteness as symptomatic of misogynistic attitudes in Allen, contending that he – like Emmet – values her primarily for her passivity and inarticulateness. A less ideological reading of the film construes Hattie instead as an embodiment of the audience to which Emmet is so Modernistically indifferent. Viewed in these terms, Hattie’s incapacity to talk reflects that audience’s parallel want of self-expression. (2016: 282)

He refers to Hattie as a ‘thoroughly allegorical character’. In this sense, she remains largely an abstraction, a narrative object that performs a thematic role rather than as a fully formed subjectivity. While he is quick to dismiss accusations of misogyny, he also flattens Hattie to an object-role in the film, one that women often play, as character motivation or thematic signifier. Both arguments seem valid, although they are problematized by their place in Allen’s cinema. The reception of the film is overwhelmed by the jazz playing and adoring auteur’s presence – it’s impossible to read the film as anything other than a Woody Allen film. Lloyd Michaels reflects on the nostalgic sense of the film in his article on Allen’s cinema of regret (later included in his book, which is called Sweet and Lowdown). He refers to the film as ‘Allen’s most nuanced portrait of the shallow man’s regret but also his most self-revealing film’: … in the epilogue, Allen observes how Emmet ‘seemed to fade away’. This self-reflexive phrase speaks to a sense of cinema at the end of the twentieth century – the passing not just of Hollywood or the foreign art film, but of celluloid itself. Perhaps the phrase also conveys Allen’s sense of his own eclipse, the nostalgia he has so often applied to Manhattan, jazz, and Hollywood movies now reflecting the loss of his own ideal conception of himself. (2017: 480)

Hattie therefore fits with this conception of nostalgia. Morton’s performance is nostalgically evocative of silent cinema; it’s noticeable how many reviews

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refer to her resemblances to Harpo Marx, Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford. Her performance is more enacted on the face than it is the body, although she does embody the verisimilar code, as Roberta Pearson referred to the developing sense of realism in silent film acting (1992). Morton’s performance is analogue, rather than the highly codified pantomime of early silent film performances. As Pearson explains, the verisimilar code developed from a limited lexicon of digital signs that were discontinuous in nature (the histrionic code, as she refers to it). ‘The verisimilar style no longer held gestures for dramatic effect and the fully extended, upward, outward, or downward movements of heightened emotion were dropped’ (ibid.: 37). Morton’s performance is not in the digital mode. It is a much more modern performance in its stylization, as is its depiction of sexuality. This nostalgic reflection of lost cinema is felt most significantly in the scenes in which Hattie travels to Hollywood with Emmet. His band are due to play in a short. We see the short being filmed, Emmet craning his neck over the singer to be seen by the camera. Hattie’s narrative is separate to this – she encounters some of the fame that Emmet so desires and despises. While on the set, she is spotted by a director, who casts her for her resemblance to May Talmadge, to play her younger sister in The Tomb of the Mummy. That Hattie is mute is irrelevant; the part has no lines, so she’s cast for her image only. She is thus again objectified, and we see her only in a couple of shots, as foreground, in a mirroring pool and kissing her co-star, an experience that sends her into a trance on and off-set. The choice of Talmadge is an interesting one – given that the film is a (fictional) talkie – since Talmadge did not successfully cross over to the sound era. She made only two sound films that achieved disappointing box office and retired in the very early 1930s. This therefore represents a kind of nostalgia for silent cinema – Hattie the silent film actress, cast for look, not for voice – and for its performances (and the performers who never connected with audiences once the sound era came). Lloyd Michaels’ discussion of Allen’s own nostalgia for something lost, or something coming to an end, echoes this desire for a lost object, or subjectivity, that has (or will) pass into myth (as the film’s repeated ending undermines the realism of the images in the film). Those final moments of the film also posit Hattie as lost object for Emmet.

The Voice and Space As we have seen, the absent voice has been the subject of a number of discussions surrounding the film, from its initial reception to later scholarship,

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although the film has received little focus in studies of Allen’s films. Hattie’s voice is perhaps better described as ‘missing’ than as lost. There is no sense in the film that she has ever been able to speak. There is no indication of trauma that means she has lost her voice. Hattie is simply voiceless. She has no critical or intellectual voice, unlike many of Allen’s other female characters, consequently she doesn’t experience those same frustrations, both sexually and mentally, of Annie Hall or Mary Wilkie, the WASPy women who often typify Allen’s filmmaking. After they meet for the first time, Emmet is surprised by Hattie’s desire. She strips off his clothes when they go back to his room. That Hattie is both silent and sexually uninhibited marks her as the opposite of those other female characters, but this also re-establishes her as a misogynistic fantasy figure, particularly as she fulfils a role as Emmet’s ideal audience member. After that first sexual encounter, Hattie gives Emmet his guitar and encourages him to play. He plays ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ and, as he does, the camera tracks into Hattie’s face in a single take as she responds to the music. At first, she’s surprised by the music, then breathless as she listens. The shot ends with a slow, defined blink and an ambiguous semi-smile. She initially seems a reactive plate to Emmet’s music but later an equal to him as his womanizing and selfishness repeatedly upsets her. Hattie does speak through her actions and through Morton’s performance with her face; she is constantly reacting – with sadness, joy, anger. Nevertheless, Hattie exists only in relation to Emmet and his relationship with her. He mistreats her repeatedly, although he also surprises her with gifts and food when he finds a pile of money. Despite Morton’s skilled physical performance, which emphasizes her eyes and her youth,2 the absence of Hattie’s voice is marked. As I mentioned above, it’s missing rather than lost through trauma, and it’s difficult to imagine the character differently if she did have a voice. The role she plays in the film as Emmet’s muse is because she is a good and reactive listener rather than because she’s voiceless. Morton’s performance ensures that she’s always emotive, and her expressivity is externalized through her face and actions rather than through speech. She is headstrong and steadfast as well as active. On their trip to Hollywood, we see her changing a tire while Emmet sits strumming away alongside his bandmates. This emphasizes Hattie’s resourcefulness, although the joke is really about Emmet’s selfishness and thoughtless treatment of her. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, in Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (2009), establish the basic parameters for psychoanalysis’s 2

Morton was just 22 at the time of the film’s production.

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focus on the voice in terms of gaze theory. They point out that ‘the gaze… need not be ocular but is in fact often embodied in noises and hearing’ (142). We aren’t talking about Hattie, however, in terms of a sonic space or of a ‘sonorous envelope’, to use Mary Ann Doane’s term (1980: 44), but as an absence of voice from the aural space of the film. As Doane discusses, techniques such as voices off and voiceover, including interior monologue, speak to hierarchized spaces, both within the diegesis and outside it: ‘The voice displays what is inaccessible to the image, what exceeds the visible’ (41). For Hattie, the interior is almost always inaccessible through voice, and she is therefore reduced to image, where, as Doane also argues, ‘the body has always been the site of woman’s oppression’ (50). What is perhaps most significant here are the multiple voices in the film around Hattie. In addition to the diegetic voices of Emmet and the other characters, there are also faux-authority voices in the documentary segments. While some of those voices, including that of the auteur himself, are actual Jazz authorities, they align with Doane’s comments that expert voices are ‘for the most part’, but not exclusively, male (42). If we compare Sweet and Lowdown with a more recent film with a mute female character, the Guillermo del Toro-directed The Shape of Water (2017), we have a similar feature of voiceover granted through the male voice at the end of the film. Sally Hawkins’ performance as Elisa is very similar to that of Morton’s, filled with innocence and wonder, and with recourse to music as a form of interior monologue that replaces the voice. One key difference is that Elisa’s voice is visualized through sign language, the means through which she speaks to the Amphibian Man, which is subtitled for the viewer. There is therefore an externalization of the voice that grants a power and agency to Elisa that is denied to Hattie. Yet this power of the voice is granted across Sweet and Lowdown to the commentators who frame the story through their expertise (it’s worth noting again that, while they are mainly male, they are not exclusively so). The voice plays a key role in psychoanalytical and feminist understandings of sound in cinema. Doane notes that the voice ‘is an interface of imaginary and symbolic’, a bridge between the structuring role of language and the organization of sounds into codified and binding structures (45). Psychoanalytically, the voice is heavily associated with the mother. Mladen Dolar refers to this as ‘the problem of the mother’s voice’ which is the ‘first representation of the dimension of the other … the first nest and the first cage’ (2006: 50). The retroactive fantasies of the connection to the ‘sonorous envelope’ of the womb as a metaphor for the movie theatre are complicated by the doubleedged sense of the mother’s voice as pre-oedipal, a dominating sound that pre-exists ‘the imposition of a signifier and a lack’. Yet, as Doane argues, while

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in psychoanalysis the pre-oedipal mother’s voice dominates, the voice is also ‘the instrument of interdiction, of the patriarchal order’ (49). Women’s voices become an island surrounded by patriarchy, a continued reminder of their otherness. As we come to discuss Uma Thurman’s Blanche, we will see how this echoes Doane’s comments here, but it also sheds light on the othering of women’s voices in Allen’s films, often associated with mother figures and the anxieties that constrain women within his cinema. Hattie’s own shortage of voice points to her own lack, and the absence of the voice is a doubled signifier of lack. That she becomes a mother by the end of the film also forecloses the possibility of her as the retroactive fantasy of the pre-oedipal mother, where her lack of voice also does not pre-exist the symbolic. In his review of Dolar’s book, Steven Shaviro contends that ‘the voice always stands in between: in between body and language, in between biology and culture, in between inside and outside, in between subject and Other, in between mere sound or noise and meaningful articulation’ (2006). That Hattie lacks a voice means she stands outside rather than in between – she is easily constituted as Other rather than subject – something that the film’s characters do, especially Emmet when he first meets her, losing a coin toss with his drummer for her. That many of the reviews praised Morton’s performance suggests that she is able to overcome the distinction between inside and outside, her eyes in particular capable of expressing interiority wordlessly. That her voice is absent means there is nothing in between body and language, and in psychoanalytical terms, of course, this is problematic. Her exteriority is pre-verbal and visual, unlike the sign language of Elisa in The Shape of Water, which is codified as language in another visual form, and she presents the in between of performer and audience and the connection between them. As such, the symbolic role can overwhelm the individuality of the character, no matter her agency or characterization within the film. As mentioned earlier, Hattie exists only to speak to Emmet’s art and characterization. She is the Other to demonstrate his misogyny. Kaja Silverman’s seminal work The Acoustic Mirror, establishes f ilm sound as an analogous function to suture, a mechanism whereby lack is disavowed in the text. It functions to cover both male castration as well as that of woman herself. Therefore, she sees it logical that ‘the female voice should have come to represent a stress point in the functioning of the entire cinematic apparatus’ (1988: 63). The female voice, in classical cinema, thus becomes a key structuring point of the association between the female body and voice through its association with interiority. That interiority takes a few forms, of the inside of the text where the woman performs and the interiority of the narrative, the story-within-a-story that

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dramatizes her femininity. Yet rather than establish that interiority as a form of thinking agency, it has the opposite effect: ‘to establish the female body as the absolute limit of female subjectivity’ (64). Her interiority is merely an extension of exteriority, the opposite side of its inside. This extends to the physical interiority of her body, whereby ‘the female voice [comes to] provide the acoustic equivalent of an ejaculation’, exposing that which otherwise remains ‘hidden or unknowable’ (68). Silverman discusses the case of the mute woman in the 1948 Jean Negulesco film Johnny Belinda. For Silverman, this articulates ‘the subordination of the female voice to the female body’ (69), something shared with the reviewers who accused Sweet and Lowdown of wishing for a mute female body. Silverman contends that the mute female unveils the female discursive lack, ‘reiterating woman’s castration by embedding her voice and interiority in corporeality’. The body therefore speaks in the absence of the voice. That Hattie makes no attempt to speak, through sign language or external symbols, means her interiority is rooted in her expressivity through the face. And hence we return to the schism between the character as written and the character as performed. Hattie is Othered, objectified in a range of ways, often by Emmet, which helps retain our sympathy, but, as I’ve mentioned, this seems an anomaly in Allen’s work – she stands out as a signifier of this kind of Otherness, however we read that Otherness. Whereas many of Allen’s other female characters seem marked by the kind of external interiority mentioned by Silverman, Hattie’s interiority is writ large through the absence of her voice. Her interiority is defined solely through her body, so while this demonstrates aspects of agency, such as her forthright sexuality and manual dexterity, she is defined solely as image. Yet, while she appears to be a misogynist object, her Othering within the diegesis and Emmet’s misogynist treatment of her is the enactment of her performance within the text. Morton’s sympathetic portrayal of Hattie elevates her Otherness, although her subjectivity remains rooted in her inability to speak and therefore in her corporeality. Hattie very abruptly disappears from the film at the height of her happiness. The documentary structure effects a jump from scene to scene and therefore elides the logical progression of the fictional narrative. Indeed, questions exist in the historical record and thus can be left hanging. Emmet meets Blanche at a party his band are playing at. When we first see her, she’s androgynously dressed, like Marlene Dietrich. She’s a socialite, the total opposite of Hattie, who tries to psychoanalyze Emmet. But what’s of interest here is her voice. While she obviously has a voice, she is also granted an interior monologue through her writing about Emmet. She

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seems more typically Allen-esque in her characterization: WASPy, intellectual, talkie. Her ‘talk’ is a problem in the film. When she and Emmet visit a train yard, he is childishly enamoured by a passing locomotive. She analyzes him through that metaphor, and he simplifies her analogy: ‘You sound like you want to go to bed with the train!’ Their relationship breaks down as they squabble about him hiding his feelings. Blanche functions as a different character to Hattie. Hattie is the perfect listener – she adores the music. Blanche is more concerned with her own writing and pushes him to get in tune with his emotional side to improve his playing. The only difference she sees is when he listens to Django Reinhardt for hours and cries. The androgyny of her f irst appearance is highly signif icant. Her voice adopts a key masculine function, with access to an interior monologue through her writing. Therefore, it ‘exceeds the visible’ in a way that Hattie’s ‘voice’ is subordinated and rooted in her corporeality. Both characters also share a nostalgic function through their reference to earlier f ilm stars based on their images. Yet the f ilm presents Hattie as a sympathetic character and Blanche as more aggressive, perhaps because she emphasizes a lack of Emmet’s own. When her relationship breaks down with Emmet, she leaves him for another ‘rough’, Anthony LaPaglia’s mobster, who stokes her fascination in the same way that Emmet originally had.

Conclusion Sweet and Lowdown offers something problematic in terms of its female characters. While it is ultimately a film about a man – and a film about a misogynistic character who expresses regret for his actions – its female characters offer several different images of femininity (as well as its intersections with class). Hattie’s absence of a voice is an unusual aspect of female characterization in Allen’s work: while she is not the first female character in Allen’s work to be from a lower-class background or less educated nor the first to be reduced solely to an image (like Sharon Stone’s cameo), she is perhaps the f irst to be received in such a complex way, as both an allegorical function of the text and a symbol of Allen’s own alleged misogyny. That she also offers a nostalgic reflection of earlier film performances and as an overt comparison with the more typically Allen-ish Blanche gives us a range of potential readings of the character as one written by a male writer with significant personal baggage, but also as a bravura performance by a female actor, where aspects of the film’s

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reception have sought to make distinctions between the two in ways not necessarily afforded Thurman. As Zacharek stated, the audience will remember Morton’s performance far longer than most other aspects of the film. There is a critical distance, like the one that Dederer mentioned in her own re-watching of Allen’s work, between the auteur and the performer that leaves the viewer with reservations vis-à-vis the character and its embodiment. The weight of the auteur’s biography is inescapable, yet the skill and nuance in the performance, the actor’s own ‘writing’ of the role, are worthy of recognition of their own authorship.

Bibliography Bailey, Peter. (2016). The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. Barthes, Roland. (1978). Death of the Author. In S. Heath (Ed.), Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana, pp. 142–148. —. (1993). The Face of Garbo. In A. Lavers (Ed.), Mythologies. London: Vintage, pp. 56–57. Björkman, Stig. (1995). Woody Allen on Woody Allen. New York and London: Faber & Faber. Dederer, Claire. (2017). What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? [Online] Available at: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/art-monstrousmen/ [Accessed 3 November 2020]. Deleuze, Gilles. (2001). Cinema 1: The Movement Image. London: Continuum. Doane, Mary Anne. (1980). The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space. Yale French Studies, Volume 60, 33–50. Dolar, Mladen. (2006). A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ebert, Roger. (1999). Sweet and Lowdown. [Online] Available at: https://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/sweet-and-lowdown-1999 [Accessed 5 November 2020]. Elsaesser, Thomas, and Hagener, Malte. (2009). Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. London: Routledge. Gilbey, Ryan. (2018). The end of the auteur? [Online] Available at: https:// www.theguardian.com/f ilm/2018/mar/23/the-end-of-the-auteur [Accessed 3 November 2020]. Leclere, Margaret. (2018). The death of the auteur director in the #MeToo age. [Online] Available at: https://theconversation.com/the-death-of-the-auteurdirector-in-the-metoo-age-95254 [Accessed 3 November 2020]. Michaels, Lloyd. (2017). Sweet and Lowdown: Woody Allen’s Cinema of Regret. London and New York: Wallflower.

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Miller, Julie. (2019). Samantha Morton Has Seen and Survived Hollywood’s Dark Side. [Online] Available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/07/ samantha-morton-interview [Accessed 3 November 2020]. Pearson, Roberta E. (1992). Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films. Berkeley: University of California Press. Romney, J. (2000). Deconstructing Woody. [Online] Available at: https://www. newstatesman.com/node/151516 [Accessed 5 November 2020]. Sarris, Andrew. (1968). The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. New York: Random House. Schwarzbaum, Lisa. (1999). Sweet and Lowdown. [Online] Available at: https:// ew.com/article/1999/12/10/sweet-and-lowdown-2/ [Accessed 5 November 2020]. Sellors, C. Paul. (2010). Film Authorship: Auteurs and Other Myths. London and New York: Wallflower. Shaviro, Steven. (2006). A Voice and Nothing More. [Online] Available at: http:// www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=489 [Accessed 6 November 2020]. Silverman, Kaja. (1988). The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Taubin, Amy. (2006). Sweet and Lowdown: Art for the Artist’s Sake. [Online] Available at: https://www.seattleweekly.com/film/sweet-and-lowdown/ [Accessed 5 November 2020]. Zacharek, Stephanie. (1999). Sweet and Lowdown. [Online] Available at: https:// www.salon.com/1999/12/03/lowdown/ [Accessed 3 November 2020].

Filmography Annie Hall. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1977 Celebrity. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: Miramax Films. 1998 Deconstructing Harry. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Fineline Features. 1997 Johnny Belinda. Directed by Jean Negulesco. USA: Warner Bros. 1948 La Strada. Directed by Federico Fellini. Iraly: Ponti-De Laurentiis. 1954 Manhattan. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: United Artists. 1979 Radio Days. Directed by Woody Allen. Orion Pictures. 1987 Shape of Water, The. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2017 Stardust Memories. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1980 Sweet and Lowdown. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Sony Pictures Classics. 1999 Take the Money and Run. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Cinema Releasing Corporation. 1969 Wild Man Blues. Directed by Barbara Kopple. USA: Sweetland Films. 1998 Zelig. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Warner Bros. 1983

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About the Author Steven Rawle is an associate professor at York St John University, where he teaches media production and film studies. He is the author of Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley and Transnational Cinema: An Introduction and co-author of Basics Filmmaking: The Language of Film. He has published many articles on aspects of independent cinema and Japanese cult film, and his writing has appeared in journals including Film Criticism, Asian Cinema, The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema and Scope.

9

‘Some Nights It’s the Only Game in Town’ The Prostitute in Woody Allen’s Oeuvre Klara Stephanie Szlezák

Abstract At least since the short story ‘The Whore of Mensa’, published in the New Yorker in 1974, the female prostitute – whether she appears on a film’s margins or takes on a more prominent role – has been a recurrent figure in Woody Allen’s oeuvre. In the case of Mira Sorvino’s character Linda Ash, the prostitute is the story’s protagonist alongside Woody Allen’s character in the widely acclaimed 1995 film Mighty Aphrodite. This chapter investigates the various perspectives on the image of ‘the fallen woman’ that Allen’s writing provides. Keywords: prostitute, Mighty Aphrodite, Shadows and Fog

Introduction ‘I rarely think in terms of male characters, except for myself only. I have a tremendous attraction to movies or plays or books that explore the psyches of women, particularly intelligent ones’, Allen once said (quoted in Shone 2015: 54), explaining his noticeable ‘affinity with women’ (Rapf 2013: 257). His exploration of the opposite sex runs like a common thread throughout his oeuvre and casts female characters in all sorts of roles: mothers and mothers-in-law, sisters, daughters and nieces, friends, girlfriends, fiancés, wives and ex-wives, lovers and mistresses. One of these diverse female characters, however, stands out both for the frequent appearances she makes in his works and for her position at the margins of society, which her profession brings with it. Ever since the publication of Allen’s short story

Hall, Martin R. (ed.), Women in the Work of Woody Allen. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463722926_ch09

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‘The Whore of Mensa’ in the New Yorker on 8 December 1974, the prostitute, whether she appears on the margins or takes a more prominent role, has been a solid institution in his oeuvre.1 Yet whereas the girls in this parodic story offer their intellects to paying customers, the prostitute characters in his films sell their bodies. So striking is the presence of the prostitute in Allen’s creative mind that one can even find an online column that offers ‘A Complete Guide To Woody Allen’s Many Hooker Characters’ alongside rather laboured miniature reviews trying to determine the degree of funniness of each of these prostitute characters. By now, the list could be extended, with Allen’s recent comedy A Rainy Day in New York (2019) featuring two ‘hooker characters’. As awkward as the coalition of humour and the depiction of the grim topic of prostitution may seem at first – especially to a contemporary mind that is acutely aware and critical of all forms of sexism, misogyny and exploitation – it is an old one. Cinematic representations of prostitution go back more than a century, and ‘[it] is likely that the first prostitute representations were in comic mode’ (Campbell 2006: 8) – after all, ‘nothing is sacred’ (Rapf 2013: 258) in the comedy genre. That Allen, whose ‘primary genre is comedy’ (ibid.), should insert his prostitute characters into a comic framework is thus neither surprising nor out of place. This chapter therefore takes this comic treatment of prostitution in Allen’s work as a given and takes a closer look at where exactly the comedy originates from and what its effects are. Even though the prostitute is a recurring character in Allen’s oeuvre, and even though scholars have explored the role of women in Allen’s films (e.g. Rapf 2013; Shapiro 2014), remarkably little attention has been paid to the numerous whores, hookers, escorts and call girls. In its endeavour to explore the diverse kinds and roles of prostitute characters in Allen’s oeuvre, this chapter does not claim to provide a comprehensive study of all the instances in which prostitute characters appear in Allen’s cinematic oeuvre. Rather, it focuses on select f ilms to fathom recurring themes. The f ilms at the centre of this chapter are Shadows and Fog (1991), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Deconstructing Harry (1997), To Rome With Love (2012), Café Society (2016) and A Rainy Day in New York (2019). Depending on the individual film, the prostitute characters assume a diversity of roles, most significantly that of an articulator of a female perspective on prostitution and that of a matchmaker. Yet arguably, the central function that the prostitute characters fulfil in the

1 It is worth noting on the side that, while the prostitutes in his own films are always female, in John Turturro’s comedy Fading Gigolo (2013), Allen plays the role of the male prostitute’s pimp.

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respective story lines is to trigger laughter and, with it, comic relief, all the while debunking hypocrisy and mocking bourgeois morality.

The Prostitute and the Female Voice Given the close entanglement of Allen’s own life and his films and the resultant reflection of his own mental state in his films (Rapf 2013: 257) as well as the role of prostitute characters as objects of projection for male fantasies, it seems only natural that Allen’s films portray prostitutes from a male perspective, which has ‘found the fictional prostitute uniquely suited to embodying fantasies in which [men’s] acute desires and anxieties find expression’ (Campbell 2006: 5). The stereotypical outer appearance of prostitute characters in Allen’s films supports the idea that Allen’s, in this regard, may not be very different from other male filmmaker’s representations of prostitutes. His hookers, call girls and escorts are very attractive women, promising their male clients to satisfy all their needs unconditionally: Linda (Mira Sorvino) in Mighty Aphrodite feels she owes Lenny (Woody Allen) ‘a great fuck’; Cookie (Hazelle Goodman) in Deconstructing Harry responds to Harry’s (Woody Allen) wish to be tied up by saying ‘Whatever you want’; Anna (Penelope Cruz) in To Rome With Love declares, ‘I’m here to fulfill your dreams’; Candy (Anna Camp) in Café Society, less self-confident but in principle without reservation, says, ‘I’m willing’; and Terry (Kelly Rohrbach) in A Rainy Day in New York affirms, ‘I make dreams come true’, while Mrs. Welles (Cherry Jones) in the same movie reveals that she used to ‘provide the lonely male of the species with a little casual recreation’. This readiness to please men sexually is unmistakably presented as one side of a business transaction, with the prostitute characters either naming their price, demanding the pay up front, or confirming the receipt of the required sum. Interestingly, the prostitutes’ male counterparts in the scenes and storylines that focus on the theme of prostitution are not ordinary clients: Lenny in Mighty Aphrodite pays for Linda’s time but does not want to have sex; when he ends up sleeping with her, she does not charge him for it. By contrast, Harry in Deconstructing Harry surprises Cookie by wanting to get straight to it, whereas in her experience ‘most guys don’t like to just jump right into bed without a little talking, they think it’s a little too business-like’; then he pays her more than twice her rate, but not for sex. In To Rome with Love, Anna and Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) do sleep with each other, but Antonio does not pay for it; Tommy and Fabio, who did, remain unknown

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to him. And Gatsby (Timothée Chalamet) in A Rainy Day in New York pays Terry ten times her rate, yet not for sexual favours. Instead, like Anna, she is supposed to accompany him to a formal event, pretending to be his significant other. This aspect is strongly reminiscent of what might be the most widely known film featuring a prostitute: in Pretty Woman (1990), the prostitute is also paid to act as the man’s companion at formal occasions. The idea that A Rainy Day in New York makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to Pretty Woman, if only in passing, is supported by the scene in which Gatsby plays the piano at a hotel piano bar while the staff are still cleaning up, when a woman in underwear with only a robe/coat over it walks up to him. Unlike Lenny, Antonio and Gatsby, Jack (John Cusack) in Shadows and Fog explicitly pays money for the privilege of sleeping with Irmy, but Irmy is so uncomfortable with the idea of being a ‘whore’ that she gives away the money she earned that way and Jack, a regular at the brothel, finds himself having developed futile feelings for Irmy. Bobby in Café Society does order a hooker, looking for sex. Yet he is a reluctant client from the get-go, telling his brother over the phone that ‘there is nothing sexy about a commercial transaction’; as the prostitute is as unexperienced and clueless as he himself, he sends her off with the money without having demanded nor received sexual services in return. This suggests that Allen uses prostitute characters not primarily to present prostitution being carried out on the big screen. While prostitute characters are considered ‘characters who […] make cash transactions for sexual services with multiple clients’ (Campbell 2006: 6–7), this very transaction is complicated or fails in all the films. The themes of prostitution and what it entails are incorporated in the films, but at the same time the focus shifts away from the notion of ‘(sex) business as usual’. As the traditional business transaction on which prostitution is based disintegrates, so does the traditional perception of the prostitute as ‘sexual object’, ‘created and sustained by patriarchal society to service men’s desires’, ‘required to make her body available to men on demand, and then condemned for doing so’ (Campbell 2006: 3). There are instances among the wide range of Allen’s prostitute characters in which the female prostitutes assume a position towards their customers that can be described as self-confident and resisting subordination and that often goes hand in hand with a sense of female solidarity in the face of male folly and cluelessness. The prostitute, in this case, becomes a ‘subject’, an ‘independent woman contemptuous of the hypocrisy of the system’ and ‘a threat to that society’ (ibid.). This aspect strikingly appears in a brief scene in Shadows and Fog. Running away from the circus, Irmy runs into a woman on the street whose

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profession is revealed when she says, ‘I’m used to the streets. It’s how I make my living.’ With the killer on the loose in the foggy night and Irmy having no place to go, the prostitute decides to take her back with her to the brothel, where they are safe. Irmy’s hesitation upon learning that ‘the house’ is ‘the whorehouse’ and the prostitute’s reaction – ‘Stop looking at me like that’ – make clear the gap between the respectable Irmy and the other, ‘fallen’ woman. The film then cuts from the street to the brothel, where cheerful music and bright lights create a contrast. Women in corsets and thin bathrobes welcome her, using her profession as a sword-swallower as an opportunity to make a rather crude joke. The next cut leads right into the prostitutes’ dinner conversation: they are in the kitchen, eating stew and discussing their clients’ unusual sexual preferences. The prostitutes have fun mocking their clients’ fantasies, such as wanting to be walked on a leash or wanting to have sex with identical twins. Unlike the rest of society, the prostitutes can look behind the men’s façade, realizing that their ‘innocent and dignified look’ is nothing but pretence. Irmy’s naivety provokes one prostitute to share the story of her descent into prostitution: while she prostituted herself for the benefit of her husband’s health, he left her upon learning how she got the money he needed. Her husband’s action, while in sync with society’s moral principles, reveals his lack of humanity and decency, which the other prostitutes collectively condemn with the comment ‘good riddance’. The camera movement, going around in circles and passing each woman’s face one by one as they eat and talk, underlines the idea of a closed group that the women form, excluding men and bound by female solidarity as they exchange thoughts on sex, love, marriage and the luck necessary to meet the one person that is right for you. The camera’s eye leaves the circle upon a knock on the door as the male clients arrive. In turn, it is the men who are objectified as one of the women says, ‘Finally! The rent’. In the business context of prostitution, women are reduced to their bodies and men are reduced to their cash. Similarly, in Mighty Aphrodite, Linda welcomes Lenny to her apartment by saying, ‘Hi! Are you my 3 o’clock?’, identifying her male customers not by their name but classifying them as appointments. When Jack offers Irmy money to sleep with him, she declines at first, with the other prostitutes intervening on her behalf, telling Jack to back off. When Irmy eventually decides to do it for an unheard-of amount of money, she does so consciously, flattered and possibly knowing it gives her a chance at an independent life. The conversation that Irmy and Jack have afterwards explicitly reflected on the implications of sex in exchange for money: While Jack declares Irmy’s compliment meaningless, pointing

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out that as a paying customer he does not have to perform well in bed, he wonders what sex feels like for a woman when it is a business transaction. Irmy apparently sees no need to lie and admits that she thought of the money at first and feels strange afterwards. However, the subsequent scenes surrounding Irmy and Jack’s tête-à-tête reveal how rigged the system is in favour of the male customers. Not only is Irmy held up by the police and made to pay a fine for unsolicited prostitution; she is also turned into the object of Jack’s bragging at a bar, during which he not only describes the typical prostitute as ‘used’ and ‘jaded’ but also stresses Irmy’s ‘sweetness’ and ‘innocence’ as enticing and unusual qualities in a woman whose body you can buy. As he lapses into rather used and jaded animal metaphors to describe Irmy as ‘a tigress’, ‘a jungle cat’, and himself as ‘a stallion’, he comes across as full of himself and disrespectful and fulfils negative clichés of johns. Interestingly, at this point, the film allows for a certain ambiguity as to how the sex between Jack and Irmy actually was. Jack refers to her as ‘a violent, screaming, passionate jungle cat’. Paul, who sits with Jack at the bar, immediately – and without knowing, of course, that Jack is talking about his girlfriend – identifies Irmy’s behaviour as good acting. Whereas Jack is convinced Irmy genuinely enjoyed the sex with him, Paul calls him naive and takes everything that Jack considers signs of the prostitute’s enjoyment for mere pretence. During the dinner scene at the brothel, Irmy presumed she would be unable to ‘take money from someone and then pretend to feel passion’. Thus, the viewers are left in the dark as to whether Jack’s chauvinist rendering of his lovemaking is accurate or whether, as Paul suspects, he was fooled into believing he was a good lover by Irmy, who quickly learned to pretend and only did and said what she knew Jack wanted to see and hear. While the ambiguity is later resolved as Irmy admits that she did have fun with Jack, the scene in the bar leaves the audience with the notion that male clients’ perception of their sexual performance may diverge considerably from what prostitutes perceive and that male clients can quite easily be duped by prostitutes, who, as good service providers, will always allow men to believe what they want to believe. Along similar lines, as the prostitute Dorry leads Kleinman to a bedroom in the brothel and he hesitates, ‘I’ve never paid for sex in my life’, she replies, ‘You just think you haven’t’, implying that, without noticing, men always recompensate women for sexual favours. Shadows and Fog depicts prostitution as an institution that is set up for the men’s enjoyment and regulated by a patriarchal society. Yet it is also noteworthy that the prostitutes it shows are self-confident women operating their own business without interference by a pimp, objectifying clients as

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mere sources of income, sticking together, and deriding their clients as the weaker sex prone to pay absurd amounts for ‘that little furry animal between [their] legs’. Similarly, Anna in To Rome With Love is self-reliant, fully aware of the hypocrisy involved in prostitution, and potentially a threat to high-ranking members of society. When she finds herself at a fancy cocktail party amidst ‘the most important business tycoons in Rome’, she has the exclusive knowledge and power to identify them as adulterers and hypocrites. Whereas Antonio is all but paralyzed with reverence and fear of being unable to make an impression on them, Anna scornfully shrugs off his admiration, ‘Some crème de la crème. It’s my whole client list.’ One by one, she meets her clients at the buffet, with each of them being shocked to see her in a milieu where, as a prostitute, she does not belong and filled with worry that their wives might see them together. The men’s fear and nervousness stand in stark contrast with Anna’s ease. Almost patronizingly, she tells them to relax. Protecting them from discovery, embarrassment and damage to their marriage, which is an integral part of their social standing, is part of Anna’s business ethos. Siding with the deceived wives, out of female solidarity, and revealing the husbands’ betrayal would not only mean betraying her clients’ confidence, it would also as a consequence rob her of her livelihood. Anna is highly professional, as she evidences throughout, making ad hoc appointments even without her planner handy and independently of a pimp and remembering individual clients’ preferences. Almost ironically, while Anna is not a failed, wannabe actress like others among Allen’s prostitute characters, she does a decent job at playing Milly, despite the fact that she does not look the part of a virtuous young bride. When Antonio asks her to impersonate Milly to keep up appearances, she refuses at first, saying, ‘Pretend to be your wife? I’m not an actress.’ Yet by the time they reach the cocktail party, she seems to have internalized the role, as she strokes ‘her husband’s’ hair in a casually intimate gesture. Eventually, the fake couple consummates their ‘marriage’. It is at this point that Anna takes an interest in Milly’s role in their marriage, asking how Milly can take Antonio’s tenseness and insecurity and whether she was a virgin when she married Antonio. After she gave Antonio ‘a lesson in love’, and as he struggles with his bad conscience, she rightfully assesses, ‘[…] you’re the prude, not Milly’. Without knowing Milly, Anna realizes that, contrary to what Antonio claims, it is due to his prudery and not due to Milly’s alleged saintliness that their sex life is inhibited and rather uninteresting for the both of them. As the closing scene in the Antonio/ Milly storyline of the film shows, Milly at the end benefits from Anna’s

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intervention and the ‘learning experience’ that the prostitute provided her husband with. In Allen’s recent film A Rainy Day in New York, the relationship between the protagonist Gatsby Welles and his ambitious, cultured mother takes an unexpected turn when she reveals to her son that she used to work as a prostitute. Following Gatsby’s expression of disbelief, the camera slowly zooms in on Mrs. Welles as she tells the story of her past. During her monologue, the camera remains focused on her face, moving a woman who was once a ‘figure at the margins of society’ (Campbell 2006: 4) to the centre of attention. Mrs. Welles, the former prostitute and now high-society lady, explains that she met and fell in love with Gatsby’s father while ‘hooking’. Rather than shame or embarrassment, Mrs. Welles displays self-esteem as she clarifies that her husband put her ‘hard-earned’ money into starting the company that made possible the entire family’s comfortable life and that, coming from nothing, she ‘put [herself] through school’. With a remarkable amount of introspection, Mrs. Welles goes on to account for her ‘overzealous’ efforts to force her sons into socially sanctioned patterns, explaining that as an ex-prostitute she wishes to create a maximum distance from the world she came from. As her revelations make clear, these efforts are also made for her own sake since she tries to ‘eradicate unsavoury remnants of many hotel rooms [she] still [wakes] up screaming over’. A Rainy Day in New York thus presents prostitution as an experience that is traumatizing for women (Campbell 2006: 4), haunting them for decades and changing them lastingly. Just before hearing his mother’s ‘X-rated tale’, Gatsby calls her ‘the queen of taste’, and indeed, she appears regal, sitting, as on a throne, in a luxurious armchair, wearing an exquisite evening gown, her face dignified. The immediate juxtaposition of these two seemingly contradictory images of women – one appreciated by her peers for her role as a wife, mother and socialite, the other paying visits to strange men in hotel rooms for a living – demonstrates the extent to which these images are constructs, ascribing certain valued qualities to one kind of woman while ostracizing the other for providing services demanded by members of the socially validated group. Explaining that she consciously ‘cultivated an image’ of herself in order to erase traces of the young ‘hustler’ from Indiana, Mrs. Welles impersonates both the superficiality of these preconceptions and the permeability of the corresponding social boundaries. A Rainy Day in New York depicts a prostitute character that is neither romanticized by the notion of a ‘fallen woman’ being rescued by a wealthy and generous (ex-)client nor by the illusion that prostituting oneself does not

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leave scars on the soul. Both facets of romanticization can be found in Pretty Woman, a film that, due to its popularity and commercial success, widely circulated a problematically unproblematic image of prostitution. Without detailing the brutal reality of a prostitute’s life, Mrs. Welles’ monologue still works towards ‘de-romanticizing the prostitute’ (Campbell 2006: 6). The prostitute’s voice that speaks in this film articulates neither shame nor humiliation but a strong sense of self-worth and the wish to cope with a traumatizing past.

The Prostitute as Matchmaker As the example of Mrs. Welles shows, the prostitute characters in Allen’s films are in most cases not exclusively prostitutes: they are also mothers, advisors or friends. In some cases, they fulfil another, rather unexpected function within the overall plot: they positively influence the relationship between the men they sleep with and their spouses. In To Rome With Love, the freshly married Antonio and Milly at first seem clumsy with each other and out of place in the big city. As they both temporarily go their separate ways, by accident, they both commit adultery. What becomes obvious from this turn of events is that Antonio completely misjudges his wife and her needs. Whereas he envisions her as a Madonnalike, pure woman who would never cheat on him and for whom sex with the lights on counts as ‘wild times’, she seeks a more adventurous sex life. Ready to sleep with a famous film star and ending up sleeping with a burglar, she is neither innocent nor shy. Antonio and Milly’s development from an insipid to a passionate couple happens thanks to Anna. Not only does Anna, as a woman, take Milly’s side and understand Milly’s perspective – as mentioned above – her interference with Antonio’s view of Milly’s sexuality and her encouragement to be braver in all things physical make a significant difference for the couple. While Anna’s last scene in the sequence is the one in the garden, her influence is more far-reaching. In the closing scene of that storyline, when the couple is about to make love in the hotel room, Antonio remembers what he learned from Anna and announces a more creative approach to lovemaking than usual, which his wife wholeheartedly embraces. By teaching Antonio how to satisfy Milly, Anna, whose business thrives thanks to adulterers, has ironically provided this married couple with a means to prevent adultery. This theme of the prostitute as matchmaker is explored on an even larger scale in Mighty Aphrodite. Early on in the film, the problems in Lenny and

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Amanda’s marriage become apparent: they fight, they no longer have sex, Lenny feels bossed around, Amanda feels caged. Possibly to compensate for what is missing in his life, Lenny becomes fixated on finding the mother of his adopted son. After what seems like a wild goose chase, Lenny locates Linda Ash, only to realize that his son’s ‘dynamite mother’ is a porn actress and ‘hooker’. Initial obstacles in Lenny and Linda’s relationship, mostly caused by Lenny’s refusal to have sex with Linda, are overcome and what ensues is the growth of a friendship that includes regularly shared meals, joint leisure activities, gift-giving and Lenny’s attempt at setting Linda up with a decent young man. Through his friendship with Linda, Lenny is drawn into the milieu of a prostitute and learns about the difficulties Linda faces: her dependence on a menacing pimp, male violence and her lack of the option to rely on the help of the authorities, who represent ‘the patriarchal regime’ (Campbell 2006: 4). Just like Irmy in Shadows and Fog, she knows the police are not on her side. Meanwhile, Amanda flees their unhappy marriage, too, and flirts with and kisses a co-worker. Eventually, she tells Lenny she plans to move out of their apartment. At this point, the film takes a decisive turn. In order to vent his anger and frustration, Lenny visits Linda, but they not only talk but also end up sleeping together, without Lenny paying for it. Although Amanda was the first to kiss another man, she does not go any further. Sleeping with Linda causes Lenny to rethink his relationship with Amanda, to realize how much he misses her, and to reconcile with his wife. In the closing sequence of the film, which shows impressions from Linda’s and Lenny’s lives, the audience sees Lenny and Amanda as a happy family and as a couple with a functioning sex life. Linda’s influence on Lenny2 and his marriage is accidental rather than intentional. Whereas Lenny had concrete plans to create a romance between Linda and Kevin, which failed, Linda never intended to bring Lenny and Amanda back together. Yet the fact remains that Lenny and Amanda reunite right after Lenny spends the night with Linda. Both in To Rome With Love and in Mighty Aphrodite, the relationships of the men that the prostitute characters sleep with – notably not as an actual instance of prostitution, as neither of the two men pays for it – and their spouses improve considerably after the men have sex with the prostitute. The aspect of adultery, in both 2 Lenny’s influence on Linda can be understood against the backdrop of the Pygmalion material. That same material, as Lothar Mikos has shown, is also applicable to Pretty Woman (1993). While Lenny’s influence on her is not inconsequential, it is not the focus of this chapter, which concentrates on the prostitute characters as subjects rather than objects.

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cases, is downplayed or excused by the fact that the wives, too, seek romantic adventures elsewhere. Whether inadvertently or deliberately, the prostitute characters do not appear as home wreckers, as might be expected, but rather as matchmakers, infusing a lifeless marriage with (new) passion.

The Prostitute and Bourgeois Sensitivities While the prostitute character’s precise role in the overall plotline varies from film to film, what the films in question have in common is the association of comedy and prostitution. The comic effect of the prostitute characters in Allen’s works results from their clash with and violation of bourgeois sensitivities. ‘Perceptions of prostitution’, as Jenkins states, ‘are based on culturally determined values that differ between societies’. In contemporary Western societies, prostitution is generally frowned upon and not considered acceptable. It is primarily when the prostitutes come in direct contact with representatives of the middle and upper class that the contrast between the demimonde and the so-called respectable society is exploited for comic effect, as the audience is likely to identify with the bourgeois characters’ shock, disbelief and embarrassment. The guise of comedy thereby also helps assuage the implied social criticism. To achieve this effect, the prostitute characters are presented in a stereotypical, if not exaggerated way. Their deviation from bourgeois moral standards is primarily signified through their gaudy physical appearance: ‘a distinctive dress code for the prostitute has been compulsory’ since ‘it’s an economic necessity to signify her availability’ (Campbell 2006: 7).3 Terry in A Rainy Day in New York reveals her assets in a more subtle way, since she is looking for clients in a high-end hotel, so that neither Gatsby nor his brother suspect her to be a prostitute. Mrs. Welles’ reproach that Gatsby brought Terry to the party to humiliate his mother in front of her guests shows that everyone else picked up on Terry’s role just based on the way she dresses. In Linda’s, Cookie’s, Anna’s and Candy’s case, on the other hand, the clothes leave no doubt as to their line of work. The colours are too garish, the skirts and pants too short, the tops too tight, the heels too high, 3 In Shadows and Fog, the prostitutes’ appearance is not employed for comic effect. Nevertheless, the costume design is symbolic in the film: while the first prostitute Irmy meets is dressed rather discreetly while she is on the street, her fellow prostitutes back at the brothel are unmistakably members of their occupational group, which makes them contrast with Irmy’s buttoned-up outfit.

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the necklines too low, the accessories too dazzling for these outfits to be comprised within the limits of the middle-class ‘normal’. These outfits become all the more shocking and extraordinary when juxtaposed with socially approved styles. After all, ‘[the] system compels the prostitute to mark herself off from respectable women, creating a coding of physical appearance, which is instantly recognizable and can be readily appropriated by the cinema’ (Campbell 2006: 8). In Mighty Aphrodite, Linda’s and Amanda’s wardrobes could not be more different: whereas Linda wears garish colours, skin-tight and short cuts, and synthetic, cheap-looking fabrics, Amanda dresses in subdued, mostly dark colours and loose-fitting styles, including tight collars and ankle-length skirts. 4 This contrast also underlines the difference in character between the two women – Linda seems all the more cheerful, Amanda all the more grumpy and stern – and makes Linda look more fun, by comparison, but also silly and clownish. Only in the end, when she has turned into a respectable mother and wife, does she wear inconspicuous clothing. Cookie in Deconstructing Harry uses bright pink, tight-fitting latex and velvet to cover the little skin she does cover, which makes her appear out of place both in Doris’s orthodox Jewish home and in the university president’s office. In To Rome With Love, Anna in her bright red mini dress, bright red lips, and bright red high heels does not leave much of her body to the imagination and visually clashes both with Milly, who by her own admission looks ‘like a small-town school teacher’ in her plain flower dress, and with Antonio’s aunts in their neat, Chanel-style costumes. While Candy in Café Society, set in an earlier period, naturally covers more of her body, her choice of colours and accessories and her make-up are also unambiguous indicators of her profession and set her apart from both Vonnie and Veronica. So essential an aspect is the prostitutes’ way of dressing that other characters’ comments on their clothes are frequently turned into jokes or punchlines in the films. In Mighty Aphrodite, this happens without words. When Lenny tries to help Linda pick an outfit for her first date with Kevin, her flashy choices annoy Lenny to the point where he takes her to a Chanel boutique. In To Rome With Love, Anna joins Antonio’s family on their tour of the city in her work attire, causing one aunt to ask, ‘You don’t have a more relaxed dress?’ and one uncle to worry, ‘Let’s hope they let her in [the 4 A striking exception is the evening she leaves Lenny, when she wears an unusually short skirt, suggesting that her (sexual) liberation from her marriage goes hand in hand with a more daring clothing style.

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Vatican]’. When Candy wonders whether she looks like a prostitute, Bobby in Café Society answers, ‘Yeah, look at yourself! Are you kidding me?’. In none of these films is the contrast between bourgeois tastes and the prostitutes’ choices more pronounced than in Mighty Aphrodite, where in addition to what Linda’s clothes signify, the audience also gets a glimpse of her interior decoration. So tasteless is the collection of trinkets in her apartment – ranging from a clock with copulating pigs and a watch that shows a bishop ‘fucking [a woman] in the ass’ to penis cactuses and phallic ornaments in the aquarium – that the audience cannot help but laugh, both at the items themselves and at Lenny’s reaction of stupefaction and repulsion. Similarly, the audience might laugh and/or blush upon hearing Linda’s crude choice of words when she speaks, in her shrill voice, about sex. The matter-of-factness with which she uses words like ‘fuck’ or ‘blowjob’ and speaks of clients that were (not) ‘hung like a horse’ or that ‘whip out a big dick and wave it all over the joint’ makes Lenny visibly uncomfortable, to the extent that he gets overly fidgety and qualmish. A case in point is the scene in which she and Lenny have lunch. The camera zooms in on her as she gives an enthusiastic account of her first acting job, detailing the sex scene she played before the camera. The fact that engaging in sexual acts with three men in front of the camera made her realize that she ‘[likes] acting’ and wants to study acting makes Lenny – and probably the audience – gasp. Linda’s frankness and complete lack of inhibition are comic in the sense that they contradict conventional notions of decorum and propriety. The comedy in the scenes where middle- and upper-class characters are confronted with prostitute characters derives not only from the exaggeration in the representation of the prostitutes and from the fact that audiences may identify with the bourgeois characters’ bewilderment. The films also provoke laughter at the expense of these (male) bourgeois characters, as their fears of being associated with prostitution and therefore falling into disrepute are made the object of derision: ‘Male anxiety over this class of person who is […] constantly threatening to step outside the defined limits’ pervades their (re)actions and robs them of all reason and ease (Campbell 2006: 3–4). Without even having had sex with the prostitutes, the male characters lose their nerve when seen with them, stumbling under the pressures of societal expectations and controlled by the socially approved moral standards they have internalized. Thus, in Mighty Aphrodite, Lenny hectically tries to lower the shades in his office when Linda pays him an unannounced visit, knowing that the receptionist knows (that he knows) who Linda is and worrying about what people at his workplace might think of him. Antonio in To Rome With Love reacts with even more agitation to the

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risk of being found out, condemned and shunned by members of his social class. Likewise, the aloof businessmen at the garden party lose their cool when Anna shows up next to them at the buffet. Bobby’s edginess is also a source of comedy in Café Society: when his landlord drops off Candy after she knocked on the wrong door by accident, Bobby – a version of Allen’s recurring character of the neurotic New York Jew – all but freaks with embarrassment and anxiety. Realizing that his planned night with a prostitute is a failure for a variety of reasons, he sees her out almost hysterically, ‘I can’t. Let’s go. It was nice to meet you. Thank you so much. Please don’t talk to anybody on the way out.’ As in all three cases their outfits betray the prostitute characters’ profession, the merest contact with them is something to be hidden and to be ashamed of. Especially given that none of the men has actually had sex with the prostitutes at that point and that, therefore, they are ‘innocent’, the depiction of their panicky state ridicules their dependence on their peers’ opinion, their submission to social norms, and their weakness of character. As dependency, submissiveness and weakness are traits traditionally ascribed to women, the films implicitly comment on the constructedness of gender roles and images. In the same critical vein, the juxtaposition of prostitute and (haute) bourgeoisie often results in the bourgeoisie’s exposure as prudish, decorous on the surface but anything but morally superior underneath. When the voiceover towards the end of Mighty Aphrodite reveals to the viewers that Linda will marry the helicopter pilot she just met on the road, he implicitly criticizes Kevin’s narrow-mindedness and lauds Linda’s future husband for being ‘a wonderful man who was not uptight and repressed and accepted it and even laughed at wild tales of her promiscuous background’. In Deconstructing Harry, a married co-worker of Harry’s fictional alter ego Harvey Stern encourages the young man to call a prostitute, explaining that having sex with a prostitute does not count as cheating on one’s wife because ‘she’s a hooker’, while at the same time being anxious to act clandestinely. In a casual remark, Anna in To Rome With Love, whose client list consists of the city’s most respectable businessmen, shows she comprehends the hypocrisy that (high) society is based on and expresses her disdain when she says, ‘These upper class feel entitled’. Along the same line, Gatsby in A Rainy Day in New York takes a prostitute to his mother’s fancy social event as an act of rebellion against a life of ‘pretentious appropriateness’, claiming that he would do ‘anything to shake up that collection of appropriate snobs’. More privileged social classes, the films thus imply, may be quick to put themselves on a pedestal and to pass judgement on the institution of prostitution, the women who engage in

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it, and the milieu that spawns it, while being steeped in pretentiousness, insincerity and double standards.

Prostitution and/as Failure When his older gangster brother encourages Bobby in Café Society to order a prostitute to alleviate his loneliness, he counters Bobby’s objection that paying for sex is unappealing by saying, ‘Yeah, you’re right, kid. It’s the worst, but some nights it’s the only game in town.’ As pervasive as the theme of prostitution is in Allen’s oeuvre, it is never propagated as a desirable path or option, neither for the prostitutes nor for the clients. It is striking that the actual business transaction that constitutes prostitution most of the time fails: either the prostitutes receive money without sexual intercourse (Café Society, A Rainy Day in New York), or the men develop uncalled-for feelings for the prostitutes (Shadows and Fog, A Rainy Day in New York), or sex takes place without the men paying for it (Mighty Aphrodite, To Rome With Love). Stuck in the system of prostitution, most of the prostitute characters did not freely choose this path. While bearing their lot without self-pity, thus resisting the ‘pathos’ of the ‘fallen woman narrative’ (Campbell 2006: 10–12), the women reveal that either financial necessity forced them to prostitute themselves (Jenny in Shadows and Fog, Candy in Café Society, Terry and Mrs. Welles in A Rainy Day in New York) or that the milieu they came from predestined them (Linda grew up amidst drug abuse, crime and violence). Finding themselves in difficult circumstances, Allen’s prostitute characters are at no point portrayed as flat characters. While Linda and Candy are certainly not the brightest among Allen’s women characters, with their very naivety serving as a source of comedy, they display complex traits such as honesty5 as well as hope and ambition for their lives beyond prostitution – in their case, for their careers as actresses. A striking aspect that runs across these diverse representations of prostitute characters is that the films explore the intersection between prostitution and acting. Either the prostitutes are failed actresses, as in Mighty Aphrodite or Café Society, or they have no such aspirations professionally but end up acting anyway, feigning to be someone else, as in To Rome With Love or in A Rainy Day in New York, or to feel something they do not feel, as in Shadows and Fog. That Allen recurringly connects the theme of prostitution with that 5 For instance, Linda reminds Lenny that it is wrong to lie, and Candy freely admits that she is not experienced.

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of acting invites multiple readings. While in the case of Linda and Candy it can be understood as a commentary on the hazards of an artist’s life and of show business, the intertwinement of the two themes also suggests the idea that, as a prostitute, switching into another persona is so essential for survival that in some sense prostitution may per se not be unlike acting. Besides Allen’s interest in complex female characters as well as his exploration of the interwovenness of prostitution and acting, his frequent turns towards the theme of prostitution may be an expression of one of the four deep-seated anxieties that Marat Grinberg claims pervade Allen’s oeuvre, namely the anxiety ‘over relationships, love, and commitment’ (2015: 41). Part of the appeal of a prostitute’s services, one might argue, lies in the very absence of love and commitment, in the promise of mere sex with no strings attached. And yet Allen’s depictions of prostitution more often than not complicate the narrative of prostitution as nothing other than an easily available source of sexual satisfaction. Without the sentimentalized redemption of the fallen woman à la Pretty Woman, Allen’s prostitutes in most cases do develop relationships with the male characters. Little does it matter whether these relationships are platonic (Lenny and Linda; Harry and Cookie) or romantic (Mr. and Mrs. Welles), lasting or temporary. Allen’s treatment of prostitution as something more than easily available sex thus mirrors his anxiety over ‘relationships, love, and commitment’ – and sex, I would add – insofar as it is an expression of the unreliability of prostitution as an easy supplement to committal relationships as feelings and the course of events are beyond the characters’/humans’ power. Harry Block is a case in point. Striking as a client in his initial refusal to have only a brief casual conversation with the prostitute he ordered, he soon gives Cookie detailed insights into his mental state. In the hour of his greatest need, when he gets out of focus and is falling apart, it is neither one of his ex-wives, ex-girlfriends nor lovers that is by his side, but it is Cookie, the prostitute, who is there for him. While their relationship is neither romantic nor lasting, it is significant enough for her to care and significant enough for him to be recomposed by her.

Conclusion Prostitute characters make a strikingly frequent appearance across a broad range of Woody Allen’s films, to the extent that a closer look at their diverse roles in these films has long been overdue. A detailed analysis of Shadows and Fog, Mighty Aphrodite, Deconstructing Harry, To Rome With Love, Café Society

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and A Rainy Day in New York has revealed the multi-layeredness of these representations. Even when treated within the comedy genre, prostitution is not depicted in a romanticized or ridiculed way. More often than not, prostitution is closely linked to failure, either the failure of individuals’ aspirations or the failure of the rules that the institution originally is based on. Rather than casting women merely as helplessly trapped objects of male sexual desires, the films in question show the prostitutes’ agency. They assume considerable importance either as articulators of the prostitutes’ perspective on the institution itself or as quasi-mediators that positively influence their customers’ ailing relationships with their spouses. Most importantly, the prostitute characters serve to expose and deride upperand middle-class double standards, with the not-so-subtle criticism of a hypocritical society well camouflaged in verbal and situational comedy. Depicting prostitution in combination with humour by necessity involves the risk of being accused of trifling both prostitution itself as well as its grave side effects such as betrayal and adultery, STDs and other health risks, and coercion and violence against women – not least for a filmmaker who finds himself the target of widely publicized sexual abuse allegations. The close reading of the case studies was meant to show that in the films in question, even if the prostitutes’ physical appearance is stereotypical or even exaggerated, there is always more to the depiction of prostitute characters than the depiction of prostitution. Not only do these characters add diverse layers to the overall plot and character constellation, their function within these films’ comic appeal is firmly rooted in the mockery of a society that is libidinous enough to require the institution of prostitution but too cowardly and uptight to acknowledge its existence.

Bibliography Allen, Woody. (1983). The Whore of Mensa. In Without Feathers. New York: Ballantine Books, pp. 35–41. Campbell, Russell. (2006). Marked Women: Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Cinema. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Grinberg, Marat. (2015). The Curable and Incurable Anxieties of Woody Allen. AJS Perspectives, Spring, 41–42. Jenkins, John Philips. (2019). Prostitution. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www. britannica.com/topic/prostitution. [Accessed 15 August] Mikos, Lothar. (1993). ‘Liebe und Sexualität in PRETTY WOMAN. Intertextuelle Bezüge und Erfahrungsmuster in einem Text der Populärkultur’. In: montage

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AV. Zeitschrift für Theorie und Geschichte audiovisueller Kommunikation, Jg. 2, Nr. 1, S. 67–86 Rapf, Joanna E. (2013). ‘It’s Complicated, Really’: Women in the Films of Woody Allen. In Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus, (Eds.), A Companion to Woody Allen. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 257–276. Shapiro, Elliot. (2014). ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Goodye)’: Disposable Women in the Films of Woody Allen. In Vincent Brook and Marat Ginsberg (Eds.), Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen. Brandeis University Press, pp. 190–212. Shone, Tom. (2015), Woody Allen: A Retrospective. New York: Abrams. Wagner, Hedwig. (2007). Die Prostituierte im Film: Zum Verhältnis von Gender und Medium. Bielefeld: transcript. (2020) You Whores: A Complete Guide to Woody Allen’s Many Hooker Characters. Deadspin, 15 June 2012. Web. 02 Oct. https://deadspin.com/ you-whores-a-complete-guide-to-woody-allens-many-hooke-5918631.

Filmography A Rainy Day in New York. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Signature Entertainment. 2019 Café Society. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Amazon Studios. 2016 Deconstructing Harry. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Fineline Features. 1997 Fading Gigolo. Directed by John Turturro. USA: Antidote Films. 2013 Mighty Aphrodite. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Miramax Films. 1995 Shadows and Fog. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Orion Pictures. 1991 To Rome With Love. Directed by Woody Allen. Italy: Sony Pictures Classics. 2012

About the Author Klara Stephanie Szlezák is a Lecturer in American Studies and Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Passau in Germany. Her research focuses on the fields of Jewish American Studies, History of Photography and Visual Culture Studies, Film Studies, Museum and Tourism Studies, and Preservation History. Dr. Szlezák published a monograph titled Canonized in History’: Literary Tourism and 19th-Century Writers’ Houses in New England in 2015 while simultaneously co-editing the book Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen for Palgrave Macmillan.

Part 5 The Muse and Inspiration

10 Too Much, Too Young? Woody Allen’s Life, Work and Women in the #MeToo Era Jason Lee Abstract This chapter examines the work of Woody Allen in the context of the accusations of child abuse paedophilia made against him. Many of his best-known works have the central character played by Allen in a relationship with a much younger woman. In these roles, he self-consciously asks questions about the legitimacy of such relationships, publicly engaging with these questions through artistic methods. The chapter deals with a number of key questions crossing aesthetics, ethics, biography, autobiography, memory studies, trauma studies, gender studies, sexuality studies and reception studies. How does the private and public life of a filmmaker change our reception of his work, if at all? Keywords: youth, monstrous men, autobiography

Fiction v Reality Public opinion on Woody Allen and his films has shifted since the #MeToo era. Allen and his films were at the heart of the American establishment and at the centre of film criticism since the 1970s (Monaco 1981: 299). We only have to consider two of his comedies in the early part of that decade – Bananas (1971) and Sleeper (1973) – to acknowledge his standing, and then there is also Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979). These films created this era along with the mythic elements of New York (ibid.). From the 1950s to 1970s, professional opinion did not consider sexual abuse to be a danger or significant social problem (Jenkins 1996: 84–85). Perpetrators, especially those in positions of power, were protected by the press (Lee 2005). The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a media storm in the United States and

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Britain concerning sexual abuse allegations (Davies and Dalgleish 2001). Since 1992, Woody Allen’s life and work, often indistinguishable as argued here, have been inseparable from the media attention given to the child sexual abuse allegations made against him. His influence is ‘characterised by a compulsion to repeat and a desire to separate, underpinned, no doubt, by Allen’s biographical scandals’ (Hannington 2020). Concern over sexual abuse led to what Allen’s supporters would call a new censorship and witch-hunt. Witch-hunt was a term also used in the late 1980s and early 1990s regarding some claims of child sexual abuse, including claimed satanic ritual abuse. The view that there was a witch-hunt narrative has been challenged (Cheit 2014), but it does have legitimacy. False claims of child sexual abuse have happened that were often framed as satanic when they were fantastical (Lee 2005). In Allen’s case, claims of censorship also have some validity. In 2020, those working for the publisher Hachette in New York staged a walkout over Allen’s memoir Apropos of Nothing (2020), causing the publisher to cancel the book, which was later published by Arcade. Amazon claimed it was justified in backing out of a four-film deal with Allen over his comments about the #MeToo movement. He then attempted to sue Amazon for almost 70 million dollars, with the case eventually being dismissed (Handley 2019). Film involves ‘a negotiation of meanings and values that informs whole ways of life’; these are informed by existing ways of life with existing ‘power and economic inequities’ (Van Zoonen 194: 148). There is an argument that Allen’s films legitimize what can be called blurred-paedophilia, meaning relationships where the young female character may or may not be under the legal age of consent. We shall see how production companies have used interpretations of the real lives of female movie stars Allen has been involved with to promote films blurring fiction and fact further. Somewhat ironically, if we consider Allen’s early lifestyle, the content of Allen’s f ilms has been used to stress an awareness of ‘moral values’ (Brook and Grindberg 2014: 275). Playing with guilt, doubt and forgiveness is part of this auteur’s schemata. The criminal and the humourist manage to keep at arm’s length all that relegates the importance of the ego, and there is conceivable envy concerning the ‘unassailable libido position’ most of us have abandoned (Streip 1991: 173). For Allen and many other comedians, comedy is tragedy plus time; and this form of humour is a type of staged and drawn-out ethical experience containing the tragic, complexitizing the notion that the tragic hero concerns a conflict between ‘freedom and necessity that culminates in authenticity or autarchy’ (Critchley 2008: 85).

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Beyond Freudian narcissism and Sartrean existentialism, Allen’s films have also been considered ethically via the concept of ‘shallow regret’ (Michaels 2017). Shallow regret is different from absolute shame, which leads to a reversal of behaviour. The lack of real change that leads to sustained remorse makes his characters ‘fundamentally shameless’, and this might reflect on the author of the work (Michaels 2017: xiv). The strength of the artist could be seen in their ability to create characters outside their own myth. Allen’s myth is fed by interpretations of his films, a well-publicized court battle and intense media scrutiny highlighted by the #MeToo movement. At the end of his latest memoir, he quips that he does not believe in an afterlife, so he does not mind being remembered as a filmmaker or a paedophile (Allen 2020). To some, this appears funny, but it is also making light of an activity that Allen has been accused of, and child sexual abuse has of course ruined countless lives. We can read this as a joke as if Allen is dismissing the allegation, but it is clear from Allen’s statements and this memoir that he does care extremely about the accusation of being a paedophile. Copious critical discourse maintains that it is fallacious to concentrate on an artist rather than their art (Barthes 1977). The counterargument is that everything is autobiographical (Self 2018). There is an honesty in the latter, partly equating with film theory on the relationship between the text and specific historical events (Wollen 1976: 529). With Allen, we shall see that his life feeds his art – but first, key events need outlining. On 19 August 1992, Connecticut police opened an investigation into Allen concerning child sexual assault (Kranc 2021). According to one journalist, when asked by an expert where she was touched by Allen, Dylan Farrow touched her shoulder and then the following day her vagina (Freeman 2020). Hadley Freeman believes this means that Mia Farrow had coached Dylan Farrow (Freeman 2020), although it could just mean confusion on the part of an abused child if those were the events. Freeman’s unquestioning support of Allen needs questioning, but most media discourse on these events is binary. The one-sided documentary Allen v. Farrow (Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering 2021) supporting Mia and Dylan Farrow’s assertions convincingly contradicts Allen and his supporters such as Freeman, especially by showing home video footage dated 5 August 1992, with Dylan indicating in this video that Allen touched her ‘private parts’ and sexually assaulted her with the promise of going to Paris. The child states there was a ‘secret’ between her and Allen. It is claimed she had been telling her psychotherapist this for two years since the age of five. From this documentary, the argument that she was coached is doubtful. Once the investigation was initially underway, Allen held a press conference undermining any proper investigation and

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influencing the court of public opinion. Following the documentary’s narrative, the media then emphasized his love for Soon-Yi Previn rather than the sexual abuse claims, turning Allen into a victim of a supposedly scorned woman after Allen gave significant interviews with Time and Newsweek to promote his cause. Seven days after Allen was accused of child sexual abuse, he began legal action against Farrow to gain custody of their children. In their 33-page report, Acting Justice Elliott Wilk of the New York State Supreme Court condemned Allen in June 1993. Mia Farrow was called a fit mother and was given custody of the children, with Allen having to pay her legal fees. Allen’s relationship with Dylan Farrow was termed ‘grossly inappropriate’, and Wilk was not convinced conclusively that there was no child sexual abuse. The judge wrote that the psychotherapists involved had been on Allen’s side and that the New Haven investigation was corrupted. Their notes had been destroyed making their findings, ‘sanitized and, therefore, less credible’ (Marks 1993). This all leaves significant room for doubting Allen’s side of events. Allen was ‘cleared’ twice, once by the Yale-New Haven hospital’s sexual abuse clinic which interviewed Dylan nine times and then following an investigation by New York City’s child welfare administration. Both investigations were severely compromised by any standard. Remarkably, when the Yale-New Haven report was completed, Allen presented the findings immediately to a press conference before the state attorney who commissioned the report saw it. According to convincing experts in Allen v. Farrow, Dylan Farrow’s interviews were consistent with someone who had been sexually assaulted, and social worker Paul Williams’ case worker notes show that Dylan Farrow had knowledge of being sexually assaulted. Allen lost the custody battle and was condemned by Wilk, but the fall-out from that battle is still with us. As numerous celebrity gossip blogs and related material testify in the court of public opinion, Mia Farrow is often still believed to be a revengeful evil woman, with this being the cause of the scandal. Framed within this paradigm, it has to be asked: would anyone be that evil to want their daughter to believe she has been sexually abused as a child?

#MeToo Breaks Almost a quarter of a century later, controversy surrounding Allen’s life, work and women re-ignited with the #MeToo movement. The Me Too movement was started in 2006 by Tarana Burk, but it was only in 2017 that it gained

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global recognition with the hashtag following Alyssa Milano’s viral tweet: ‘If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write “me too” as a reply to this tweet’ (quoted in Gill and Rahman-Jones 2020). Following the tribute to Allen as a ‘genius’ at the Golden Globes in January 2014, Ronan Farrow tweeted about Dylan Farrow’s alleged abuse. On 1 February 2014, Nicholas Kristof published an open letter by Dylan Farrow on his blog, part of the opinion pages of The New York Times, outlining the alleged abuse. Ronan Farrow shared a Pulitzer Prize with Jodi Kanto and Megan Twohey for breaking the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal in 2017, which furthered the #MeToo movement. After Weinstein was outed as an abuser, it was reported that Allen did not want this to lead to a witch-hunt (Bloodworth 2017). This then led to outrage, initiating a clarification by Allen: Weinstein was a superb distributor but was someone he would never directly work with, given that Allen demands the final cut (Kemp 2020). Despite this defence, for many this furthered the belief in Allen’s guilt. In December 2017, the Oscar-winning star of Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Mira Sorvino, blacklisted by director Peter Jackson due to pressure from Weinstein, published an open letter to Dylan Farrow expressing her regret over starring in the film. Others like Kate Winslet, after initially defending Allen (Miller 2017), have since stated they regret working with him (Arthur 2020), indicating the growing strength of the #MeToo movement. Conversely, celebrities such as Alec Baldwin, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Selena Gomez, Blake Lively, Kristen Stewart, Diane Keaton and Miley Cyrus have defended Woody Allen (Fang 2018). Moses Farrow, a family therapist and was twice the age of Dylan Farrow at the time (i.e. 14) – so arguably more aware of family dynamics during the alleged abuse – later came to his father’s defence after defending his mother when younger. Speaking as the only trained professional in the field within his family but unable to be objective here of course, Moses Farrow describes the allegation by Dylan Farrow as ‘ridiculous’: children did not play in the attic where Dylan Farrow claimed she was abused (but that does not mean Allen could not have taken her there) and Farrow was the abuser ‘brainwashing’ the children (an allegation refuted by the majority of the children), this being partly why he initially sided with his mother (Freeman 2020). The house they lived in, however, was so large that Moses could not have known what was occurring at every moment throughout the property. During the court case, Allen himself stated that Moses was ‘moody’ and distant that day anyway so would not have been observant. Why trust Moses’ word over Dylan’s, as Hadley Freeman does? Freeman has had what appears to be exclusive access in the UK to both Moses and Allen, so this might explain part of it.

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Child services interviews state that there was a train set as shown in Allen v. Farrow, counteracting Moses Farrow’s view. Allen’s status as a filmmaker in positioning significant people as his supporters should not be underestimated, nor should his influence on the wider public narrative. Despite Allen’s adamant defenders such as Freeman, the four-part documentary Allen v. Farrow convincingly exacerbated the public’s uncertainty regarding Allen’s innocence. In June 1993, state prosecutor Franc Maco believed there was enough evidence to prosecute Allen for child sexual abuse. In September 1993, he decided not to prosecute in order to protect Dylan Farrow from further trauma. Interviewed in Allen v Farrow, Maco regrets this, and Dylan states that she wanted to take the stand in court.

The Work By attributing to the child the central features of desirability such as purity, innocence and otherness, in an uncanny sense we have made essentially monstrous paedophile figures that enact this desire: think of Shirley Temple, Jodie Foster, Drew Barrymore, Macaulay Culkin (Kincaid 1998), Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey who sings about wanting older men. The majority of Allen’s work is concerned with aspects of this. The term ‘blurred-paedophilia’ is appropriate here, given that in America the age of consent ranges from 16 to 18. In Allen’s films, the girls hover within this age range. Stardust Memories (1980), rejected by some critics upon release as a ‘disappointment’ (Ebert 1980), was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Comedy written directly for screen. The film concerns a comedian overwhelmed with depression looking back on his life and loves. For Pauline Kael writing in the New Yorker, it is ‘the same thoughts over and over … like watching a loop … it’s nothing’ (1980: 189). Allen often appeared to have no other subject than young women throwing themselves at him, but he has always maintained that his films with the nebbish star were not autobiographical (Allen 2020). Actress and model Christina Englehardt claimed in one interview that she slept with Allen and Farrow when she was 16 or 17 and that she initiated the experience. For Englehardt, Manhattan (1979), where 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) ‘enthusiastically beds’ Allen’s Isaac Davis, is based on their experiences which she does not regret, saying ‘it was different back then’ (Baum 2018). Interviewed for Allen v. Farrow, Englehardt says she was raped four times from the age of 12 by people her family knew and she was Allen’s muse and she was damaged and

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now she would not let her children go to an older man’s house. One critic in the documentary argues that Allen is grooming his audience through his films to accept these relationships, which has some veracity. There is a process of normalization when they were first released, which in a #MeToo era alters their reception. This behaviour is no longer considered acceptable or normal, but some might still find it funny on screen. In Husbands and Wives (1992), Allen again asks questions about the legitimacy of relationships that have significant age gaps. This was the year of Dylan Farrow’s accusation coming towards the highpoint in child sexual abuse accusations in America that, false and real, were sweeping the country following on from the satanic abuse panic in the 1980s (Lee 2005). False memory syndrome, still a contested syndrome where therapists ‘implant’ memories, was taken seriously by police, social workers, psychologists and juries (Ofshe and Watters 1996). This could be a reason why many believe Woody Alen is innocent. One of the reasons the syndrome is contentious is because it was invented by parents of a psychologist who claimed they abused her. Due to false claims of satanic ritual abuse and a realization that therapists can suggest ideas to clients, juries became far more sceptical of child sexual abuse allegations from 1994 (Lee 2005). Unfortunately, false claims have risen since 2017 under the QAnon flag, an organization that believes satanic paedophiles rule the world, preventing resources going to those who have really been abused (Lee 2021). As Allen v. Farrow shows, one difference between false and real allegations is that false allegations become stronger under pressure. This was not the case with Dylan Farrow, and experts in this documentary believe her allegations are true. She claims that as a child she sometimes shifted her narration of events to please her questioners, which makes sense. Despite making seven films from 1988 to 1992, Allen conducted no known American interviews and, in this period, his critical reception in America declined (Kapsis 2016: x). In a British interview in 1989, Graham McCann noted oddly that ‘if Allen has learned anything from thirty years in analysis it is the need to leave certain aspects of his psyche undisturbed’ (quoted in Kapsis 2016: 56). The main artistic criticism was that Allen was repeating himself, and it would take a decade and a half for him to once again attain the heights of American critical acclaim with Match Point (2005). Research published in the Journal of Contemporary Family Therapy during this period argued that it was pointless looking for connections with the artist’s real life given that anything, however public, is ephemeral (Johnson 1993: 443–458). Alternatively, Adam Mars-Jones in the British press saw Husbands and Wives as a suicide note, partly blaming this on the unease of the technique, calling

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it pseudo-documentary and callow; a way of hedging your bets, putting inverted commas through everything (1992). Starring Mia Farrow, it was released after she had separated from Allen and was the last of their 13 films together. For New York Times journalist James Caryn, Husbands and Wives is again ‘unbearably familiar’ (1992: 7). For others, the film lacked the minimal degree of illusion necessary for fiction (Bailey 2010). Despite it being clear that Allen was drawing on his real life, this critic misses the point of the film and what the film can achieve. Sally (Judy Davis) and Jack (Sydney Pollack) want a divorce, revealing this at the apartment of Gabe (Allen aged 57) and Judy (Mia Farrow). Gabe addresses all this to the camera, and in addition is speaking as if he is the camera operator, but mainly this occurs as a confession to a shrink or possibly an interviewer. Building on the French New Wave, every film is a type of documentary of its actors, with a fiction film constructing a fiction of characters from the documentary of actors enacted before the camera (Girgus 2010). We have icon and index co-mingling and creating one impression, with the fusion of Allen’s public and private selves offering even more of an aura (ibid.). Here are the comic extremes: Judy is too emotional, Sally is not emotional enough, both creating problems for the men. This is a comment on the ridiculous expectations of men. Sally is cold in bed. Jack, initially inhibited and worried about AIDS, seeks a shrink and then goes with a 200-dollar hooker and Sally’s friend. Gabe can only have a relationship if he is in control, looking down on women like a man might look down on a child. Left with this overview, we might be concerned about the content of this film, but rather than condoning any of this, the film condemns it as foolish. In one interpretation, Judy and Rain (Juliette Lewis aged 19, as is her character) are one and the same: passive-aggressive women who affect helplessness yet get what they want (Jarvie 1997). The drama asserts that self-deception is essential for some people and for relationships to function. This was something that was being addressed at the time by popular movements in psychology such as the use of the Enneagram (Palmer 1988; Lee 2014). Judy leaves Gabe for Michael (Liam Neeson), and Gabe has been smitten by teenager Rain, the best writer in his class. This concerns the issue of professors and sexual feelings for students, a theme that has taken on enormous momentum since the #MeToo movement (Farberov 2017). Rain seduces him, but prior to this Gabe has the illusion about her that she has been through something deep when she admits writing is a trick. Allen is demystifying aspects of relationships, the creative process and psychoanalysis but continues the myth that younger women always want older men, turning the latter into victims.

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The film begins by Gabe moaning, typically, that you cannot teach creative writing, a classic and humorous attack by many novelists who get paid teaching it (Flood 2014). Gabe becomes part of the fabric of Rain’s life, as her parents love his witty stories and overt grooming technique (Davies 2014; Lee 2005). The story comically suggests this is thrust upon him, not something he would ever actively pursue. In a post-#TimesUp and #MeToo era, this scenario works differently, although it does not make it less believable. Inevitably, he just wants to kiss her in Paris but, as Judy confirms, Gabe could not cope outside the islands of Manhattan. In Allen v Farrow, Dylan Farrow claims that Woody Allen promised to take her to Paris if she was compliant in her sexual abuse. Gabe is stuck, as he is obsessed with Harriet (Galaxy Craze), who ended up in an institution – which is laughing at ‘mad’ women, a very old-fashioned joke. For Gabe, the best women are ‘nuts’, as he puts it, or kamikaze – flying into him and trying to bring him down. Like this film, the novel that Gabe is writing is semi-autobiographical. Rain claims life does not imitate art; it imitates bad television. Then come the clichés: can love be sustained; should we run off to Paris and have a kiss in the rain (Lewis is Rain); romantic love is doomed. This is all funny to a degree, but as Allen repeats this so much, this is uncanny with blurred-paedophilia haunting his texts as part of this repetition. Allen’s legal team and related press articles at the time and since have repeatedly accused Farrow of brainwashing, but his films could be said to function as brainwashing audiences into accepting blurred-paedophilia. ‘If the uncanny is a projection of the unconscious, this is only because the unconscious is already an internalization of the uncanny’ (Jervis 2008: 17). This compulsion to repeat can be compared to Allen’s repeated use of the figure of the schlemiel, the Yiddish for fool and incompetent loser, which has been equated with history returning in cycles following Michael Foucault’s interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche (Edgar 2001: 149). Everything is turned on its head as Sally and Jack decide they prefer being together, the status quo re-affirmed. We know that ‘transgressions of aesthetic experience both open onto ethical separation and allow for reparation’ (Critchley 2008: 85). Gabe uses this as material for creative work, proving that life should be imitated by art. The only one with intelligence is Rain who cannot stop throwing herself on older men, so we could question her astuteness. Aged 19, it might be argued that this is her choice, but most higher education institutions today have made it against their policy to let staff have affairs with students, again making this film’s reception different in the #MeToo era. Rain challenges Gabe over why she cannot be ambitious: ‘Is this because I’m a woman’? Gabe is criticized for his portrayals, pre-empting criticism

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of this film and Allen, and here he spells out that these are exaggerations for comic purposes: hopefully the audience and critics will get it. For Allen, his cinematography functions as a way of saving time without the standard formalism (Kapsis 2016). Addressing the camera, Gabe states that he is doing a new novel that is less confessional and more political, appearing like a humorous aside to die-hard Allen critics. Gabe is now alone, punished for what exactly – fantasies? Twenty years earlier in Play It Again, Sam (1973), Allen played a divorcee whose wife in his fantasy is dating a Nazi and a couple is helping him find a new girlfriend. As a film critic in this earlier film, Allen turns to Linda (Diane Keaton) and says he wants a ‘blonde with a big bust and an ass he can sink his teeth into’. The underlying essence is that he/the actor is an inadequate schlemiel loser but hero. This is the stereotype that Allen is so renowned for, an act he renounces as being like him in Apropos of Nothing. For Peter Bailey, it was Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) that was most akin to the break-up with Mia Farrow (2010). There is the impossibility of getting life to work out translated into a cinematic indictment of the very art that seeks to order and render coherent an impossibility (ibid.: 185). This intertextuality with real life is overt.

Mad and Bad Women In the mid-1970s, media representations of Woody Allen as a sensitive Jewish intellectual clustered around the release of his films, plays and collected prose (Arton 2010). In Apropos of Nothing (2020), he dismissed this myth. These 1970s profiles and articles – mainly featured in specific women’s journals – framed Allen as an artist who was deeply sensitive to contemporary women’s concerns. Simultaneously, a competing narrative developed that Allen was an unambiguous misogynist. Allen’s early comedy films and stand-up routines were marked by accusations of sexism and misogyny. This first originated in the mid-1960s when Allen’s first wife, Harlene Susan Rosen whom he had married in 1956 when she was 16 and he was 19, attempted to sue him over a rape joke about her in one of his stand-up routines. The tendentious joke serves a useful rhetorical function; ‘it bribes the hearer with its yield of pleasure into taking sides without any very close investigation’ (Arton 2010: 31). Rosen has since praised Allen (Merrimen 2015), as has his second wife Louise Lasser (married to Allen from 1966 to 1970). Annie Hall (1977) fans were obsessed with the film and with Diane Keaton, the role famously bringing in a fashion style. A basic theme was starting to

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occur that dominates much of Allen’s work: women want sex, then do not (Arton 2010). Allen’s next film, Interiors (1978), was critically condemned, and then in Manhattan (1979) Allen plays the part of a man in his forties with a girl who is 17, the actress who played the role being only 16. Allen became part of the macho auteur mythology along the lines of his film heroes Bergman and Fellini and also compared to Fassbinder (Arton 2010: 60, 73). With Annie Hall (1977) and The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), Keaton plays a role that indicates that American immigrants cannot assimilate, and critics condemned this (Gilman 1993). Post-Annie Hall, Keaton’s perceived lack of intelligence was still read through the lens of racial discourse. Keaton was implicitly perceived as unintelligent and inarticulate because she was not Jewish (Gilman 1993). Allen and Keaton’s on-screen relationship was also considered a culturally significant representation of Jewish-Gentile relations and evidence of the failure of inter-marriage; and this, it is argued, led to the popularization of anti-assimilationist rhetoric in the Jewish community (Gilman 1993). The superlative later film Fading Gigolo (John Turturro 2013), where Allen plays bookshop owner and pimp Murray, expertly plays with this myth. Alisa Lebow provides a useful description of the common characteristics of the Jewish mother in American popular culture in First Person Jewish. Traditional gender roles break down. The Jewish mother is shown to be ‘manipulative, overprotective, boastful […] she is a masculinized woman – loud, aggressive, outspoken, domineering – the opposite of the passive, weak, gentle, soft-spoken ideal of Western (read: Christian) femininity’ (2008: 46). Since achieving international notoriety as Mrs. Frank Sinatra in the late 1960s, Mia Farrow encapsulated what Lebow defines as the ideals of Christian femininity, working as the counterpoint to the Jewish mother stereotype. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Mia Farrow evoked the image of a selfless, wholly devoted mother, which was promoted by the media (Freeman 2020). Of course, Allen’s team of lawyers in 1993 tried to undermine that narrative, and the power of the Allen PR machine excelled in this demonization. Seven of Mia Farrow’s eight children at the time appeared in Allen’s 1986 film Hannah and her Sisters, again blurring fiction and reality. Newsweek described Hannah as a beacon of stability who had abandoned her acting for motherhood, with GQ calling her long-suffering (Lebow 2008). Fiction and reality were forever blurring. Orion Pictures used Mia Farrow’s autobiography in promoting the film, seeing a crossover between the plot and real life (ibid.). Of Catholic heritage in real life, she plays the stereotypical emasculating Jewish wife. This Jewish coded performance of motherhood

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with its implicit pathology stood in sharp contrast to the image of Mia Farrow in the public sphere. This was the case with Allen’s custody battle, and in the media battle that followed, the fictional narratives of Hannah and Her Sisters were recycled. Mia Farrow, like Hannah, was cast in the role of a mother who derives narcissistic pleasure from having multiple children, which was thought to be evil. Woody Allen at the time had significant power in the film industry and over the media. A Time cover story on the scandal portrayed Farrow as adopting children with an insane mania in order to satisfy her pathological needs (Lax 1991). Evidence for this was slim. She came from a large family and wanted one herself, but the tradition of the evil and bad mother was strong, so people believed it. Taking his father’s side later in life, her son Moses believes this (Freeman 2020). Allen’s sister Letty Aronson was quoted in Time claiming that Farrow adopted children in a manic nature, not for their needs but for hers. She supposedly favoured her biological children while treating the older adopted kids as servants according to Moses and treated the Asian children differently (ibid.). But treating people differently may actually be benign, allowing for cultural differences. Since the #MeToo movement broke, Freeman seems to be the only journalist in the UK that Allen and his side will speak with; all her articles are inevitably supportive of him. In an identical feature in New York magazine, Charles Joffe, Allen’s producer since the early 1970s, echoed the image of Farrow as a pathological narcissist. He also cites her constant need for more children as the source of the marital breakup, the need to have ‘fresh babies’ the epitome of selfishness (Lax 1991). The media offensive in support of Allen had significant impact at the time and since, given that this myth continues. The documentary Allen v. Farrow clearly shows why Mia Farrow wanted what to some seems like too many children. Pathologizing mothers and women has been central to modern culture (Showalter 1998). By 1989, Farrow had eleven children and wanted more; during the custody hearings, Farrow had two adoptions pending. Hannah’s desire to have more children and Eliot’s reluctance was the root of their marital problems in Hannah and her Sisters. Unlike Hannah, Farrow was not just portrayed as addicted to motherhood. She was also framed by Allen’s representatives and Allen as a ‘bad’ mother, and this allegation was found legally to be untrue. What is significant is the way in which Allen successfully used the case against Farrow as a smoke screen for allegations against him. This is a theme of the bad mother that Allen picks up in his relationship with his own mother in the opening chapter of his memoir, along with his dismissal of Freudian theory and the origins of his atheism

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(Allen 2020). Soon-Yi Previn was quoted as saying that, due to Farrow’s poor parenting skills, her children had fallen into ‘theft, alcohol, arrests’ and ‘severe truancy’ (Lyons 2017). But should we blame the mother for these acts when evidence is not provided? Interviews with Soon-Yi Previn became necessary once Allen’s films began to be cancelled due to #MeToo. His films were not discussed in film schools, and actors proclaimed they would never work with him again and regretted doing so. Farrow was also demonized during the custody battle for being paranoid, and Allen’s representatives drew upon the popular image of the ‘bad mother’ and the politics of blame in their smear campaign to detract from the accusations against Allen.

Conclusions Allen had had an affair with his partner’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, whom he had known since she was 10. According to Allen v. Farrow, he had been having sex with her when she was in high school. Allen believes Dylan Farrow is sincere in her belief that he abused her (Allen 2020). We have seen that the investigations into Allen were flawed. How do we label Allen a molester when he has never been convicted? But it is also false to call Dylan Farrow a liar (Coren Mitchell 2014). This suggests there is no real truth, just interpretations of truth – which is Gabe’s joke at the start of Husbands and Wives. Unfortunately for Allen, so-called evidence keeps cropping up that blurs the artistic, professional and the personal and constructs him as a pervert. In 2018, journalist Richard Morgan reported that he went through 56 boxes in Allen’s archive at Princeton University, which for him confirmed allegations against Allen. Inevitably, this provoked a backlash in support of Allen, which could be seen as a marketing coup for Allen. People like myself returned to his films viewing the content differently, looking for ‘clues’ of his perversion. For Morgan, the writings ‘dripped with repetitious misogyny’. In one of Allen’s writings, he explains an encounter he had with Nati Abascal, a Spanish socialite, who appeared in his 1971 film Bananas. Allen wrote that he ‘came to appreciate her body for what it was as time went by, namely a girl’s body […]. Soon she got used to my ways’ (quoted in Morgan 2018). In another encounter, this time with actress Janet Margolin who appeared in his hit 1977 movie Annie Hall, the director wrote that he ‘was forced to make love to her to get a decent performance’ (ibid.). Here we have further evidence of how life and art correlate. This is not precise evidence of any form of child sexual abuse, but it is of a type of blurred-paedophilia given the age differences.

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The worship of the image epitomized by celebrity culture including the self-image can be seen as a regressive step, but Allen’s persona is anti-celebrity. Ownership of the performative self via an image that is self-constructed or performing on a reality television breaks divisions in a degenerative fashion, offering false power. The operation of visibility can be equated with the banal, such as reality television, where ‘everything is put on view and you realize there no longer is anything to see’ (Baudrillard 2013: 73). Narcissism is a classic disorder, not unknown in our current age, and Allen has been tarred with this label, along with Farrow. Psychopathology is not far away, with the crowd’s ‘opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation … its constant readiness for transgression and simultaneous submission’ (Steyerl 2012: 41). Following Baudrillard and Steyerl, there is a dispersal that optimistically leads to political global alliances amongst networks including #MeToo. Allen’s ability to maintain control of his films works against the prevailing ideology of dispersal and fragmentation. #TimesUp and #MeToo have altered the context within which Allen’s work is situated and judged, so its reception is transfigured. Media gravitates towards the most scandalous and shocking, even more so in our clickbait era. Like television, these are spaces where audiences engage with complex social understandings (Livingstone 1998). The Allen story is a money spinner for this style of journalism and part of how the extremes of cancel culture can involve deleting those felt to be evil. Despite the emphasis on Allen as an auteur (every shot, every actress, each system of distribution being in his domain), this is a misinterpretation of auteur theory (Wollen 1976). He is dictated by the language of film and renowned for making homages to film itself. Our journalist in the archive came across a screenplay that was never produced titled The Filmmaker. The script was about a man called Woody Allen who shot porn films on the side and was engaged to a woman who worked at the Museum of Modern Art. Allen leaves his fiancé at the altar after he falls in love with a young schizophrenic girl. Morgan f inds all of this outrageous and evidence of Allen’s perverseness. He feels Allen is ‘dressing up crime as art’ and points to Manhattan (1979), where actress Mariel Hemingway who was 16 years old at the time of filming shared her first kiss with Allen, then 43 (2018). Hemingway was reportedly upset after the kiss due to its ferocity and asked cinematographer Gordon Willis, ‘I don’t have to do that again, do I?’. Allen attempted to date her after the film when she was 18 years old, according to The Hollywood Reporter (Lewis 2015). But in 2015, she stated that Allen had a crush on her as did others in like Robert De Niro, but Allen’s treatment of her was platonic (Lewis 2015). Like

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so many of his films, the Allen narrative flits between reality and fantasy; and like everyone’s life, Allen’s life is not clear-cut. This includes events the press and courts have poured over for decades, creating him as a text, an autofictional metanarrative offering us an ongoing drama. How his work draws fortuitously on aspects of real life has been illustrated, along with some of the complexities concerning child sexual abuse allegations. While it is hard to argue for a complete division between this artist’s work and life, we also need to remember that imagination is at play. Allen’s legacy is uncertain (Hannington 2020), but his books and films are still distributed. A Rainy Day in New York (Allen 2019) was the highest grossing f ilm of the period. The term ‘blurred-paedophilia’ can be of use here. Those in the #MeToo and related movements who want to see Allen – and others accused of perversion – fall further from grace need to strengthen alliances. For some, #MeToo has altered the way his f ilms are viewed. Feminist approaches resist practices that maintain a systematically unequal patriarchy-led capitalist system (Gago 2020). Clearly, Allen is part of this male dominance. This praxis of revolution correlates with the critique of violence under neoliberalism, colonial dispossession, and the patriarchal state terrorism directed at women (ibid.). Bill Cosby was the f irst high-prof ile celebrity conviction of the #MeToo era. This was overturned in 2021, spawning the belief that more convictions will be reversed. Working with radical feminist thought across continents is transversal in scope and is the next step (ibid.). This push towards further global alliances is a positive move in political awareness that the #MeToo movement has advanced.

Bibliography Allen, Woody. (2020). Apropos of Nothing. New York: Arcade. Arthur, Kate. (2020). Kate Winslet on How She Came to Regret Working With Woody Allen. Variety, 14 September, https://variety.com/2020/film/news/katewinslet-woody-allen-regrets-1234769410/# [Accessed 14 July 2021] Arton, Joseph. (2010). Jewishness, Femininities, and Stardom. Unpublished PhD, University of East Anglia. Bailey, Peter. (2010). The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Barthes, Roland. (1977). Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana. Baudrillard, Jean. (2013). The Intelligence of Evil, trans. Chris Turner. London: Bloomsbury.

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Baum, Gary. (2018). Woody Allen’s Secret Teen Lover Speaks; Sex, Power and the Conflicted Muse Who Inspired Manhattan. The Hollywood Reporter, 17 December, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/woody-allenssecret-teen-lover-manhattan-muse-speaks-1169782/ [Accessed 14 July 2021] Bloodworth, Adam. (2017). Woody Allen Sad For Harvey Weinstein. The Metro, 15 October, p. 1. Bristow, Joseph. (1997). Sexuality. London: Routledge. Brook, Vincent, and Marat Grinberg. (2014). Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. Caryn, James. (1992). And here we thought we knew him. The New York Times, 6 September, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/06/movies/film-view-andhere-we-thought-we-knew-him.html [Accessed 14 July 2021] Cheit, Ross. (2014). The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coren Mitchell, Victoria. (2014). Between labelling Woody Allen a child molester or his daughter a liar, I feel utterly stuck. The Guardian, 9 February, https:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/09/woody-allen-dylan-farrowalleged-sexual-abuse [accessed 14 July 2021] Critchley, Simon. (2008). Infinitely Demanding – Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso. Davies, Dan. (2014). In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile. London: Quircus. Davies, Graham, and Tim Dalgleish. (eds.) (2001). Recovered Memories – Seeking the Middle Ground. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Dutton, Kevin. (2020). Black and White Thinking: The Burden of a Binary Brain in a Complex World. Oxford: Transworld. Ebert, Roger. (1980). Review – Stardust Memories https://www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/stardust-memories-1980s [Accessed 26 January 2021] Edgar, Robert. (2001). The Schlemiel and Anomie: The Fool in Society. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Hull. Fang, Marina. (2018). Legendary French Actress Catherine Deneuve Decries #MeToo Movement as ‘Puritanism’. Huffington Post, 9 January, https://www. huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/catherine-deneuve-me-too-france_n_5a54f270e4 b0efe47ebd57dc?ri18n=true [Accessed 14 July 2021] Fischer, Lucy. (2013). Body Double: The Author Incarnate in the Cinema. New York: Rutgers University Press. Farberov, Snejana. (2017). 400 professors pen open letter urging students not to attend University of Rochester over claims a researcher preyed on female students. Mail Online, 22 November, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5108777/400professors-blast-University-Rochester-scandal.html [Accessed 14 July 2021]

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Flood, A. (2014). Creative writing professor Hanif Kureishi says such courses are ‘a waste of time’. The Guardian, 4 March, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2014/mar/04/creative-writing-courses-waste-of-time-hanif-kureishi [Accessed 22 October 2020] Freeman, Hadley. (2020). Interview Moses Farrow: I’d be very happy to take my father’s surname. The Guardian, 11 December, https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2020/dec/11/moses-farrow-id-be-very-happy-to-take-my-fathers-surname [Accessed 14 July 2021] Gago, Veronica. (2020). Feminist International – How To Change Everything, trans. Liz Mason-Deese. London: Verso. Gill, Gurvinder, and Imran Rahman-Jones. (2020). Me Too Founder Tarana Burke: Movement is not over. BBC, 9 July, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-53269751 [Accessed 14 July 2021] Gilman, Sander. (1993). Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Girgus, Sam. (2010). The Films of Woody Allen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grinberg, Marar. (2010). The Birth of Hebrew Tragedy: Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream as a Morality Play. Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 14 Issue 1, Article 3, https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol14/iss1/3 [Accessed 14 July 2021] Handley, Lucy. (2019). Woody Allen and Amazon settle legal battle over canceled movie deal. CNBC, 11 November, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/11/woody-allenand-amazon-settle-legal-battle-over-canceled-movie-deal.html [Accessed 14 July 2021] Hannington, Jessica. (2020). ‘Only Woody Allen gets to do that?’: The influence of Annie Hall on contemporary American cinema. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield. Jarvie, Ian. (1987). Philosophy of the Film. In Mark T. Conran and Aeon J. Skoble (Eds.), Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong. London: Routledge, pp. 289–294. Jenkins, Phillip. (1993). Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, Scott. (1993). Husbands and Wives. Contemporary Family Therapy, 15, 443–458. Jervis, John. (2008). Uncanny Presences. In Jo Collins and John Jervis (Eds.), Uncanny Modernity – Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. London: Palgrave, pp. 10–50. Kael, Pauline. (1980). The Current Cinema – Review of Stardust Memories. The New Yorker, 27 October, 18–19. Kapsis, Robert E. (2016). Interviews with Woody Allen. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

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Kemp, Ella. (2020). Woody Allen on why he could have never worked with Harvey Weinstein. NME, 24 March, https://nme.com/news/woody-allen-harvey-weinsteinmemoir-allegations-2634220 [Accessed 14 July 2021] Kincaid, James R. (1998). Erotic Innocence – The Culture of Child Molesting. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kranc, Lauren. (2021). A Full Time Line of Dylan Farrow’s Sexual Assault Allegations Against Woody Allen. Esquire, 28 February, https://www.esquire.com/ entertainment/tv/a35634294/dylan-farrow-woody-allen-sexual-assault-timeline/ [Accessed 14 July 2021] Lax, Eric. (1991). Woody and Mia: A New York Story. The New York Times Magazine, 24 February, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/24/magazine/woody-and-miaa-new-york-story.html [Accessed 26 January 2021] Lebow, Alisa S. (2008). First Person Jewish – Visible Evidence. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lee, Jason. (2014). The Psychology of Screenwriting. London: Bloomsbury. —. (2009). Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture. New York: Cambria. —. (2005). Pervasive Perversions – Paedophilia and Child Sexual Abuse in Media/ Culture. London: Free Association Books. Lewis, Andy. (2015). In Memoir; Mariel Hemingway Says Woody Allen, Robert DeNiro and Bob Fosse Hit on Her. The Hollywood Reporter, 25 March, https:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/memoir-mariel-hemingwaysays-woody-784506/ [Accessed 14 July 2021] Livingstone, Sonia. (1998). Making Sense of Television: The psychology of audience interpretation. London: Routledge. Lyons, Kate. (2017). Soon-Yi Previn gives rare interview to defend Woody Allen. The Guardian, 17 September, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/17/ soon-yi-previn-interview-woody-allen-mia-dylan-farrow [Accessed 14 July 2021] Maltby, Richard. (2000). ‘Nobody knows everything’: Post-classical historiographies and consolidated entertainment. In Steve Neale and Murray Smith (Eds.), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge, pp. 21–44. Mars-Jones, Adam. (1992). Two’s a Crowd: Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives reviewed. The Independent, 23 October, ://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/film-twos-a-crowd-woody-allens-husbands-and-wives-reviewed-1559051. html [Accessed 14 July 2021] Merrimen, Rebecca. (2015). Woody Allen’s first wife Harlene Rose ends 50 year bitter feud with gushing tribute. Mirror, 1 November, https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/ celebrity-news/woody-allens-first-wife-harlene-6748481 [Accessed 14 July 2021] Michaels, Lloyd. (2017). Sweet and Lowdown: Woody Allen’s Cinema of Regret. New York: Wallflower/Columbia University Press.

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Miller, Mike. (2017). Kate Winslet Thinks Woody Allen Is A Woman On Some Level. People, 7 December, http://people.com/movies/kate-winslet-thinks-woodyallen-is-a-woman-on-some-level/ [Accessed 14 July 2021] Monaco, James. (1981). How To Read A Film – The Art, Technology, Languages, History, and Theory of Film and Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morgan, Richard. (2018). I read decades of Woody Allen’s private notes, he’s obsessed with teenage girls. Washington Post, 5 January, https://www.washingtonpost. com/ [Accessed 14 July 2021] Ofshe, Richard, and Ethan Watters. (1996). Making Monsters – False Memories, Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria. Berkeley: University of California Press. Palmer, Helen. (1988). The Enneagram – Understanding Yourself and Others in Your Life. San Francisco: Harper. Self, Will. (2019). Mental Health, Writing, and Psychosis. Media Discourse Centre Open Research Seminar & Cultural Exchanges, De Montfort University, 28 February. Showalter, Elaine. (1998). Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Steyerl, Hito. (2012). The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Streip, Katharine. (1991). Psychoanalysis, humor and ressentiment. Paragraph – A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, Vol. 14, No. 2, July, 170–183. Van Zoonen, Lisbet. (1994). Feminist Media Studies. London: Sage. Wollen, Peter. (1976). The Auteur Theory. In Bill Nichols (Ed.), Movies and Methods, Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 529–541.

Filmography A Rainy Day in New York. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: Signature Entertainment. 2019 Allen v. Farrow. Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, USA: HBO. 2021 Annie Hall. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: United Artists. 1977 Bananas. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: United Artists. 1971 Celebrity. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: Miramax Films. 1998 Fading Gigolo. Directed by John Turturro, USA: Antidote Films. 2013 Hannah and Her Sisters. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: Orion Pictures: 1986 Husbands and Wives. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: Tristar. 1992 Interiors. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: United Artists. 1978 Love and Death. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: United Artists. 1975 Manhattan. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: United Artists. 1979 Match Point. Directed by Woody Allen, UK: DreamWorks. 2005

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Mighty Aphrodite. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: Miramax Films. 1995 Play It Again Sam. Directed by Herbert Ross, USA APJAC Productions. 1972 Sleeper. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: United Artists. 1973 Stardust Memories. Directed by Woody Allen, USA: United Artists. 1980 The Godfather. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, USA: Paramount Pictures. 1972

About the Author Jason Lee is Head of Leicester Media School at De Montfort University and is the author/editor of 20 books whose work has been translated into 16 languages, including work on Woody Allen and three books on paedophilia. His latest book is Nazism and Neo-Nazism in Film and Media (Amsterdam University Press). His novels include Spit Roast and Unholy Days, both published by Roman Books.

11

‘She’s a Genius, and I Don’t Use That Word Casually’ Elaine May’s Collaborative Relationship with Woody Allen Martin R. Hall

Abstract From influence to actress and collaborator, this chapter seeks to analyze the evident and powerful influence that Elaine May has had on the work of Woody Allen as collaborative muse, and considers the ways in which we can read May as ‘author’ within her two Allen screen appearances. Beyond the screen, her influence flows into Allen’s stage work too. Allen wrote the single-act play Honeymoon Motel, performed alongside May’s George is Dead and Ethan Coen’s Taking Cure, as part of the three-act play Relatively Speaking (2011) directed by John Turturro. Allen and May previously collaborated, with David Mamet, to write the three-act play, Death Defying Acts in 1995. Keywords: collaboration, comedy, theatre

Woody Allen’s work often deals with intimate portraits of women. Maureen Dowd has pointed out that, ‘as a writer, Woody Allen creates rare female roles, and, as a director, he draws rare performances from his actresses and makes them look original and enticing’ (1986). Interviewing Carrie Fisher for her role in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Dowd reports, ‘Around someone like Woody Allen – and there are not many people like him – you want to be at your best’ (1986). Overlooked, however, is the impact of Elaine May on the work of Woody Allen both on-screen and on-stage. Elaine May is a singular creative force who augments the work of anyone with whom she collaborates, but for the films in which she has acted for Allen, her authorship has a tendency

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to stand out from the filmmaker himself. May has acted twice with Allen, first in Small Time Crooks (2000), about which Richard Schickel observed that the comedy here is ‘mostly supplied by Elaine May’s radical innocence’ (2003: 59), and again in Crisis in Six Scenes (2016). Sharing a manager in Jack Rollins, Allen was well aware of May’s early comedy work, describing the inimitable ‘Nichols and May’ duo as ‘a brilliant comedy team, very perceptive and gifted’ (quoted in Kelley 1976: 18). Having previously collaborated with Woody Allen and David Mamet to produce a series of three one-act plays in Death Defying Acts (1995), Elaine May later wrote the single act play George is Dead, which was performed alongside Allen’s Honeymoon Motel and Ethan Coen’s Talking Cure as part of the three-act Relatively Speaking (2011). This chapter surveys these direct interactions that Elaine May and Woody Allen have had, and through these case studies suggests that the extensive crossover influence reaches a point of creative collaboration. From influencer to actress to collaborator, this chapter analyzes the evident impact that May has had on the work of Allen. This chapter considers May and Allen’s previous work with other collaborators – both Mike Nichols and Marshall Brickman respectively – in addition to their work together. More significantly, the thesis of the argument builds a case to explore the extent to which an actor’s performance can be considered authored and will encompass an understanding of authorship in order to better identify the role of collaborators in creative production. As will be discussed, there are many difficulties in describing a director/actress relationship as a ‘collaboration’, and as such I work from Vera John-Steiner’s definition of ‘the interdependence of thinkers in the co-construction of knowledge’ (2000: 4).

Authorship Examining differing modes of authorship is necessary when making a case for any sense of an authorship to be attributed to one individual throughout highly collaborative media such as cinema and television. Primarily, audiences and scholars alike lean upon the individual authorship model of the ‘auteur theory’, pioneered by French film critics and theorists of the French Nouvelle Vague. In the Cahiers du Cinéma journal, Bazin wrote that ‘the politique des auteurs consists, in short, of choosing the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard reference, and then assuming that it continues and even progresses from one film to the next’ (1957: 255). That is to say that an auteur is an artist whose films consistently bear ‘the personal stamp of

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the auteur’ (ibid.). This chapter seeks to discern who precisely it is in this collaborative process who can be designated as the ‘artist’. Richard Dyer explores further notions of authorship and considers the following three perspectives: ‘multiple authorship’, which argues that ‘a film text is composed of many different authorial “voices”’ (2009: 151); ‘collective authorship’, wherein ‘a group of people working closely together constitute a team who are properly thought of as the author of the film’ (ibid.); and ‘corporate authorship’, whereby ‘organisations or social structures that produce films are the authors of them’ (152). When arguing for May’s role as ‘author’ of the films in which she stars, Dyer’s fourth system – ‘stars as authors’ – is most significant. Here, building upon the notion of the auteur theory, Dyer posits that this ‘recognisable stamp’ may just as well come from an actor as from a director. Dyer refers to McGilligan’s study of James Cagney in which he writes that ‘under certain circumstances, an actor may influence a film as much as a writer, director or producer’ (quoted in Dyer 2009: 199) and argues: When the performer becomes so important to a production that he or she changes lines, adlibs, shifts meaning, influences the narrative and style of a film and altogether signifies something clear-cut to audiences despite the intent of writers and directors, then the acting of that person assumes the force, style and integrity of an auteur. (199)

This chapter then claims that, in her simple on-screen presence, May, beyond her veritable writing collaborations with Woody Allen, stands as the author of her performances and therefore can be seen as having functioned collaboratively on the production of Small Time Crooks and Crisis in Six Scenes. When exploring a theory of collaborative partnerships, it is important to consider the varying manifestation of these kinds of relationships. JohnSteiner argues for a duality in collaboration in which partnerships function as either ‘integrative collaboration’ or ‘complementary modes of collaboration’ (2000: 96). ‘Integrative’ collaborations, for John-Steiner, arise when ‘[a]rtists working together combine their different perspectives and their shared passion to shed the familiar’ (ibid.), whereas complementary modes are expressed when artists with different skills, training or backgrounds divide labour in order to produce something together. Both partnerships – Nichols and May, and Allen and Brickman – were explicitly collaborative in that two creative individuals produced work as a unit. The collaborative screenplays of Allen and Brickman were discernibly integrative, demonstrating

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this shared passion and not a harmonizing of skills that complement one another. Nichols and May on the other hand, functioned as complementary collaborators. Regarding their seamlessly symbiotic and complementary working relationship, Nachman describes this as ‘Their great strength – the complimentary yin and yang that welded their work’ (2003: 337).

Collaborative Success John-Steiner asks the question, ‘Do some partnerships have too much interdependence, and consequently experience a painful separation after the period of fusion?’ (2000: 81-82). It seems, indeed, that this was the case with Nichols and May. Whilst their relationship ended seemingly copacetic, May’s solo career hit rocky ground without the interdependence with Nichols. May’s Ishtar (1987) was described as a ‘megabudget flop’ by The New York Times (Caryn 2006), whereas Nichols’ work was more regularly award-winning and more financially successful, although he did produce some failures later in his career. Perhaps this is the marker of success for Woody Allen and his collaborations; unlike the case with Nichols and May, Allen’s work with Brickman was short-lived and his work with May, too, lasted through only four products. These collaborations were fruitful and successful, but the writer/director then moved on to other projects, effectively side-stepping this potential for ‘too much interdependence’. Whilst the Nichols and May partnership might seem to have lasted decades owing to its impact, it lasted only four years and unexpectedly dissolved at the height of their fame, in 1961. The pair were described as ‘the leading social satirists of their generation, a title never seriously threatened in the forty years of sketch comedy since’ (Nachman 2003: 319). An alternative understanding of the Nichols and May partnership comes from Nichols himself when he suggested that ‘We weren’t really a comedy team. Elaine and I kept thinking we’d be found out. We developed an act without really meaning to. We were actors, writers, and directors, all at once.’ (quoted in Nachman 2003: 321). This is quite possibly the success of the partnership; the feeling of natural fluidity and organic influence. Their acts were never contrived, and this is evident in the work itself, in the duo’s use of improvisation. Nachman, in his book Seriously Funny: Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, suggests that this improvisational fluidity – so vital and natural to May – became the downfall of the comedy team, arguing that this complementary mode of collaboration was the very thing that ‘ultimately led to their undoing’ (2003: 337) and highlighting the polarizing

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experience of Nichols’ controlling aversion to May’s natural, freewheeling improvisation. Interestingly, it is this element of play and improvisation and May’s penchant for exploring ideas as a scene progressed that aligns her with the work of Woody Allen. In acknowledging, as did Michael Chekhov, that ‘every role offers an actor the opportunity to improvise, to collaborate and truly co-create with the author and director’ (2002: 36), it is possible to read May’s acting within the work of Allen as a form of ‘authorship’, as the co-construction of meaning and thus collaboration. In her work on role play and authorship, Celia Pearce describes the former as ‘a form of what I call “emergent authorship,” a bottom-up, procedural process leading to co-created, unexpected narrative outcomes’ (2016: 445). May excelled at this role play and performative improvisation, perhaps even to a fault, as her manager Jack Rollins observed: ‘Elaine would go on forever if you let her. She is insanely creative, but she had no sense when to quit’ (quoted in Nachman 2003: 342). This notion of relentlessness in May’s approach to performance is further characterized by Nachman, who saw Nichols and May as ‘less a comedy duo than a wry duet, verbal comic musicians jamming with each other’ (2003: 322). This idea of a ‘jamming’ and interdependent co-creation well describes the interrelation between not just Nichols and May but also Allen and May; a suitably musical metaphor that chimes neatly with Allen, a musician himself.

Long-Time Collaborators Despite being a solo stage performer in the 1950s and 1960s, a collaborative approach evidently came naturally to Allen who had a decades-long collaboration with Brickman, with whom he wrote Sleeper (1973), Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). In addition to working successfully with Brickman, Allen is known for having ‘borrowed’ from the work of others – even, one might argue, the work of Elaine May. Allen has spoken of his collaborative work with Brickman positively, saying that ‘Marshall makes my game better. It’s like playing tennis with a pro’ (quoted in Braudy 1977). Brickman, too, celebrates this relationship, pointing out that in comparison to solitary work ‘I need the feedback’ (quoted in Braudy 1977). For Brickman, the collaborative working environment brings a certain responsibility: ‘when you collaborate, you are both responsible for everything. You never know when one person will make the other person think of something.’ (ibid.).

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These earlier collaborations – certainly Annie Hall and Manhattan – stand as archetypal ‘Woody Allen’ films and are perhaps his most celebrated and certainly his most well-known. Phillip French describes Small Time Crooks, one of only two of Allen’s works to star Elaine May, as being indebted to its ‘borrowing’. Yet, even more so, French suggests that Allen’s entire body of work exists outside the simple realm of a singular source of creativity, pointing out that Allen ‘has rarely made a picture tainted by total originality’, celebrating his use of referentiality and intertextuality and perhaps also his collaborative spirit by observing that ‘Woody Allen has always borrowed from other filmmakers. His latest film is, happily, no exception.’ (2003). Even regarding Allen’s more recent Crisis in Six Scenes (2016), despite being a departure in form as the filmmaker’s first episodic piece, it has been noted that the text still belongs to Allen’s regular style of borrowing. As critic Megan Koester has claimed, ‘while Crisis may signify a departure for its creator, Allen is nothing if not consistent reference-wise’ (2016). As a testament to Allen’s clear and pervasive approach to intertextual borrowing and referencing, 2015 saw the publication of an edited volume of academic analysis of precisely this element of Allen’s oeuvre, Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen. Focused on ‘investigating the wealth, the diversity, and the complexity of the references in Allen’s filmic work’, the editors point out that ‘the chapters in this collection demonstrate that [his taste for quotation, parody, pastiche] has in fact become a signature of Allen’s filmmaking and testament to his intellect’ and argue further that, ‘[f]ar from “an erasure of his artistic personality,” his artistry spanning across textual and medial boundaries is unrivalled in filmmaking’ (Szlezák and Wynter 2015: 2). In all of this, however, very little is said of May in the collection. While some have observed this intertextuality when May appears, nothing has been said of her influence on Allen’s work more directly.

Historical Context Owing to Allen’s own successful and prolific filmmaking career, he and his name have become a yardstick by which many American comedians of the 1950s and 1960s are measured and remembered. Nichols and May’s own impact on the American comedic landscape was at least as significant as that of Allen’s and perhaps even more so, as Nachman contends: ‘Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and Woody Allen left huge lasting imprints, but Nichols and May are perhaps the most ardently missed of all the satirical comedians of their era’ (2003: 319).

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Whilst Nichols moved seamlessly into film direction, May’s own films were not received as well as Allen’s but are not without their own merits. Interestingly, however, even when her work does not resemble that of Allen, she is still measured by his gauge. For a retrospective of May’s work at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center in 2006, New York Times author James Caryn claimed that ‘she does not have, and hasn’t gone for, the instantly recognizable style that a director like Woody Allen has. And while she may not be a natural filmmaker, she is a natural artist’ (2006). Whilst her work has variously been critically well-received, it is, however, punctuated by films more readily described as failures. Her film-directing career has been potted and yet her writing credits – particularly those for Nichols-directed films including The Birdcage (1996) and Primary Colors (1998), Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986), and her work under the pseudonym Esther Dale for Otto Preminger’s Such Good Friends (1971), Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait (1978) and Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie (1982) – were largely successful. In 1972, Elaine May released ‘one of the few really enjoyable comedies by a young American director in recent years’ (Cohen 1973: 60), The Heartbreak Kid. The film was directed from a screenplay by Neil Simon, who incidentally is one of the individuals who unites all three – May, Nichols and Allen. Playwright, screenwriter and author Simon provided the screen play for May’s film. In 1975, he adapted his play The Sunshine Boys (1972) for a feature film directed by Herbert Ross, which he later adapted for television in 1996 with Allen starring alongside Peter Falk in the eponymous roles, and in 1988 he provided the screenplay for Nichols’ Biloxi Blues. In 1978, Herbert Ross, the director of Play it Again, Sam (1972, written by and starring Woody Allen), made California Suite (1978), another Neil Simon comedy with four sketches in one hotel starring Elaine May and Woody Allen alumni Michael Caine (Hannah and Her Sisters [1984]) and Alan Alda (Crimes and Misdemeanors [1989] and Manhattan Murder Mystery [1993]). Having all in some way collaborated with Simon, there is a neat feeling of cross pollination amongst these filmmakers, adding credence to any argument that one might make regarding the feasibility of May and Allen’s own collaboration.

Creative Overlap May’s The Heartbreak Kid sees the Jewish marriage of Lila (Jeannie Berlin, May’s daughter) to Lenny (Charles Grodin), who falls for WASP Kelly (Cybill Shepherd) on his honeymoon. Lenny arranges to have Lila remain in their room, convincing her that her sunburn is worse than it is and contrives legal

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affairs and fictional court dates in order to find time to spend with Kelly and her family. Lenny leaves Lila and moves to Minnesota to marry Kelly and finds himself alone, reminiscing about Lila’s habits which originally annoyed him. Considering the similarities between this film and the work of Allen’s, one might initially consider the failing relationships and motifs of indecision and unrequited love so redolent in Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979). Manhattan concerns a Jewish man, in love with a younger woman, who meets and falls for an excitingly tempting WASP in Diane Keaton’s Mary Wilkie and yet finally comes to realize that he was perhaps happier with his first paramour. The two films quite expertly deal in a very similar relationship notion: a fascinating extrapolation of ‘you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’. Further comparisons exist too in the content of Jewishness in the works of both of these directors. Marat Grinberg has suggested that ‘Woody Allen ought to be viewed as a serious Jewish artist and philosopher, whose Jewish or indeed Judaic thinking shines through even or especially in the absence of apparent Jewish markers, thematics, or identity’ (2014: 38). James Fisher also considers Allen’s on-screen representations of Jewishness as associated with the work of Elaine May: Allen is one of a generation of Jewish comic writers and performers – including Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Jackie Mason, Elaine May, Wendy Wasserstein, and others – who have had their work dismissed as extensions of borscht belt comedy when, in fact, diverse influences are present. (2014: 187)

Fisher notably brings up May in his acknowledgement of these comedians, recognizing the similarities in both the context and the content of the work of both Allen and May. Allen’s Jewishness has remained a big part of his on-screen persona, as it has remained a key element of May’s work, not least of which in The Heartbreak Kid. Lila is an archetypic Jewish woman, with Mitchell S. Cohen noting that ‘Ms. Berlin, Ms. May’s daughter, is just splendid, especially as she resembles her mother. Her kvetchy Jewishness is just a touch too obvious’ (1973: 60). In the introduction to her book, Jewish Women on Stage, Film, and Television (2007), Roberta Mock observes the figure of the female actor in a way that this chapter uses to connect Jewishness with authorship. Mock’s text ties up female celebrity with the idea of the ‘“extraordinary” woman’ and suggests that the word ‘extraordinary’: can be considered, in itself, a type of categorisation bound up with Jewishness and that it is fundamental that ‘extraordinariness’ somehow

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foregrounds the ‘ordinariness’ it subsumes. Central to ‘extraordinariness’ then is doubleness, or the sense that the performer is both one thing and another and that these two things do not always correspond neatly or coherently. Two manifestations of doubleness are duality and hybridity. (2007: 3–4)

For Mock, ‘Duality is the presence of two separate aspects into one […] These potentials stem directly from the performers position in society and the expectations this creates for her as a Jew, as a woman, as an immigrant, as “low”, and as other’ (2007: 4). As a performer, Elaine May is an artist for whom these observations about doubleness, duality and hybridity ring true. As a writer, director and actress, May embodies hybridity well. And yet, significantly, this hybridity ties intrinsically into notions of authorship in terms of the hybridity of ‘collective authorship’ (Dyer 2009: 152) and in the duality required of the concept of ‘stars as authors’ (ibid.), both acting and authoring. Mock further explains: representative Jewish women who were (and are) predominantly able to control what Pamela Robertson calls their ‘Star Texts’ (that is, a narrative of continuity comprising public performances both on and offstage/screen that creates the impression of authenticity): by producing or commissioning their own performance material. (2007: 4)

Herein lies an apt description of Elaine May’s work. May is an actress who produces her own performance material and who masterfully quotes her ‘performativity in performance’ (ibid.), not least of which in her two acting collaborations with Allen. About Allen’s Small Time Crooks, Phillip French observed that the ‘outstanding performances are from Ullman as the loveable, vulnerable, naturally wise Frenchy, and May as her dotty, kindly sister-in-law’ (2000). It is not Allen taking the praise here; the richness of this film owes an enormous debt to the masterful performance of May and her air-headed character May Sloane, described in the movie as “dumb like a dog or a horse or something”. Many of the film’s funniest and most cutting lines come from May; at a ritzy party, at which she is quite out of place, she tells a high-class gentleman, “I don’t like anything with toothpicks. They lodge in your throat”; or when May refers to her ex-husband: “My husband Otto was dyslexic and the only thing he could spell correctly was his name.” The film centres on an inept crook, Ray (Allen), who concocts a plan to rob a bank by renting the neighbouring pizza store and tunnelling underneath the vault. The gang opens a cookie store (because Ray’s wife Frenchy cannot

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cook pizza), and whilst the robbery fails, the store flourishes, resulting in a billion-dollar cookie empire rocketing the low-life, uncultured couple to high society. May has starred in just one other of Allen’s works. In 2016, Woody Allen’s TV debut, Crisis in Six Scenes, was released on the Amazon Prime streaming platform. The series focuses on May and Allen as married couple Sidney and Kay Munsinger – the former an author, the latter a marriage counsellor. Their lives are disrupted when Lennie Dale (Miley Cyrus), an anti-Vietnam War revolutionary and prison escapee wanted for a bombing and the murder of a guard, abruptly turns up in the middle of the night looking for refuge. The Munsingers are currently housing a friend’s son, Alan (John Magaro), who is a soon-to-be-married member of the finance industry, following in his father’s illustrious footsteps. Lennie disrupts the status quo and radicalizes both Kay and Alan, the latter blowing himself up in the garden shed when attempting to make a fertilizer bomb. The series’ climax sees all of these different worlds meet under the roof of the Munsinger home in which a variety of groups come together at once – an elderly radicalized book club, members of the Constitutional Liberation Army, Kay’s therapy patients, Alan’s parents, his fiancé and her parents – resulting in Sidney driving Lennie to a local airport, hidden in the trunk of his car. The car is pulled over by a state trooper and Lennie escapes whilst Sidney distracts the officer who has mistaken him for J.D. Salinger. Allen’s series typif ies the strength of what May brings to their work together as collaborators in that she plays a much more significant role than she does in Small Time Crooks. In fact, here, the best jokes emanate from her character, the patently inept marriage councillor, and the elderly women of her book club. In the first episode, after Lennie first arrives, the police respond to a house alarm call and, explaining why there is a strange woman in her house, Kay says, “Our daughter doesn’t count. She was a caesarean.” Soniya Saraiya observed that ‘If there is a hero in this story, it is Elaine May’s Kay, who is the only figure in the entire series that is neither mannered nor precious’ (2016). The show begins with the book club reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and as Lennie’s influence more heavily takes over Kay’s ideas, the book club becomes militarized, with Kay suggesting a protest in front of the draft board, with another member adding that they ought to do it naked and bring along some pig’s blood. Kay at one point says of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung that she is “Fascinated by its wisdom”, describing the author as the man who “that extremely stylish little jacket is named after”. Kay eventually becomes complicit in Lennie’s

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deception when she undertakes clandestine operations on Lennie’s behalf, accepting an unmarked briefcase of cash and attempting to deliver it to a stranger – a process that Sidney inevitably bumbles, with the case ending up in the hands of the police. Despite its highlights, Crisis in Six Scenes was not successful, owing in part to ‘the show’s failure to engage with the medium in which it exists’ (Lyne 2016) and the problem that ‘there is little to distinguish it from an overlong Allen film. The episodes do not stand alone, and serialization does not add anything of note to the story’ (Saraiya 2016).

On Stage Elaine May’s more recent collaboration with Allen included the three one-act plays performed as Relatively Speaking (2011), which similarly were received inconsistently with some polarizing responses. John Del Signore claimed that ‘none of the plays are all that memorable’ (2011). Recalling the previously discussed dual nature of Jewishness and authorship, New York Times theatre critic Charles Isherwood observed that ‘nagging, wheedling, needling, needy or demanding moms – often of the Jewish persuasion, it must be said – have been an endlessly fertile resource for comedy writers’ (2012). And indeed, this is true of this set of three plays dealing variously, as the title’s pun implies, with familial relationships. Speaking of Allen’s body of writing for the stage, it has been suggested that ‘his theater work generally seems to hold firmly to the early roots of his comedy even as ethnic humor has increasingly become controversial for audiences, as critical reaction to Honeymoon Motel makes all too evident’ (Fisher 2014: 183). Allen and May’s contributions to this collection are joined by a third from renowned filmmaker Ethan Coen, who himself is little known outside of his own tremendously prolific collaborative team, the Coen brothers. Acknowledging May’s status as a playwright, the theatre critic Ben Brantley wrote, in reviewing May’s Adult Entertainment from 2002, that ‘as a playwright, Ms. May has always been a first-class sprinter’ (2002). It is interesting indeed that Charles Isherwood goes so far as to acknowledge the debt that this play owes to the historical performance modes from which May and Allen both come, describing the works as ‘old-fashioned boulevard comedy – bright easy going fare that doesn’t require the deciphering of plummy or crummy British accents’ (2012), a type of comedy, Isherwood contends, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the heydays of Woody Allen, Elaine May or even Neil Simon. Here, May’s own contribution to this triptych of familial

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depictions is seen as ‘a delicious study in the bliss of narcissism for those who can afford its more rarefied accoutrements, and the plague it can be to those in their orbit’ (ibid.). The three plays were received much less favourably by New York magazine, the work being described as one that ‘nearly drowns in its own schtick’ (Brown 2011) and identifying May’s contribution as the one piece that ‘comes closest to inflating a full script with more than mere comic potential’ (ibid.). About Relatively Speaking, which New York magazine’s Scott Brown considered to be ‘two half-kiestered comedy sketches and one actual playlet’, Brown advised that ‘if, however, you’re looking for something more substantial than petrified shtick that smells of a writer’s sock drawer, you’d be advised to look elsewhere’ (ibid.). May’s one-act contribution, George is Dead, sees Doreen, a rich socialite, come to the apartment of Carla, the daughter of her former nanny, around midnight, to announce that her husband has just been killed in a skiing accident in Aspen. Carla, who has not seen Doreen in a good many years and with whom she has very little in common, does not relate to Doreen at all and spends the time cajoling her into making all of the painstaking funeral arrangements. It is deftly funny and exquisitely well-crafted. Finally admitting that the death of her eponymous husband is indeed a release for her rather than a disaster, Doreen admits – unsurprisingly selfishly – to Carla: ‘But this is such an awkward age for him to die. My age, not his. If he had only died when I was old and past it or right after we were married, when I was young.’ (May 2011: 33). The nauseating Doreen seems the villain of the piece until Carla’s mother, the former nanny, turns up, following Doreen’s long night of phone calls from demanding mortuaries and funeral homes, and takes care of her former charge, as a stage direction describes: ‘As they [Nanny and Doreen] walk, Carla starts to follow them. Without turning, the old woman waves her away with a curt gesture… and exits with her arms around Doreen’ (ibid.: 41). Allen’s own contribution arrives in somewhat familiar territory when, in a minor plot twist, Jerry, the father of the groom, arrives at a motel with the bride-to-be. This is a work that displays Allen’s work at ‘his loosest – and sometimes lowest – but also most firecracker funny’ (Isherwood 2012); a play that depicts the cast of a failed wedding gathered at a seedy love nest motel ‘spewing choicely worded insults at one another at head-spinning velocity’ (ibid.). And yet, more adversely, Scott Brown describes the play as ‘Woody Allen’s execrable “Honeymoon Motel,” a middling, PG-13 Sid Caesar sketch inflated to grotesque proportions’ (Brown 2011) and sees the narrative as simply ‘40 minutes of strenuous mugging from Police Academy’s Steve Guttenberg, as he’s progressively upstaged and eclipsed by a terrifying

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army of character actors’ (ibid.). James Fisher gives the play much more credence, suggesting: Honeymoon Motel is a farce in the enduring sense that it questions morality and whatever is considered normal. Such issues pervade the play, while humor about Jewish life and social expectations is also rampant. Characters, largely one dimensional, represent aspects of human frailties; instead of stereotypes (in the negative sense), these figures become archetypes. (2014: 184)

Fisher also points out that ‘some critics applauded Allen’s play as the best of the trio of one acts’ (ibid.: 183). In other collaborative efforts, both Allen and May had also previously worked with David Mamet to produce another set of three one-act plays under the umbrella title Death Defying Acts (1995). Elaine May contributes Hotline, a play in which Dorothy calls a suicide hotline and is connected with new employee Ken, who loses Dorothy as she disconnects to kill herself whilst Ken battles wildly to get her back on the phone. Allen contributes Central Park West, in which two old friends Carol and Phyllis get together as one of them, Carol, has found out her husband, Sam, is leaving her for another woman, who she eventually discovers might be Phyllis. Whilst admitting that she has had an affair with Sam, Phyllis is not his only mistress, and it isn’t her he is leaving his wife for but 21-year-old Juliet. Yet more familiar territory for Allen, as Variety observed, ‘Triumph is not a word that comes to mind with “Central Park West”’ (Gerard 1995). Mamet contributes An Interview, which sees an attorney being interviewed and building a defence of his own character before being damned to ‘Eternity in Hell, bathed in burning white phosphorous, while listening to a symphonic Tone Poem’ (Mamet 1995: 23) purely because he is a lawyer, as his interviewer explains: ‘You passed the Bar, (pause) and you neglected to live forever’ (ibid.). To return to the idea of collaboration, it seems that Death Defying Acts, much more evidently than the more recent Relatively Speaking, is a unifying, collaborative effort in the vein of John-Steiner’s own understanding of the term as ‘the interdependence of thinkers in the co-construction of knowledge’ (2003: 3). Indeed, The New York Times, reviewing the play in 1995, observed that ‘Though each playwright has a distinctive voice, a unifying theme is provided by the kind of late-20th-century urban desperation that prompts everything from benign smiles to belly laughs’ (1995: 17). In making keen note of the play’s solid flow and demonstrably collaborative nature,

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Canby concludes by suggesting that ‘“Death Defying Acts” is so cannily constructed that it successfully builds from its comparatively quiet, spookily funny beginning, “An Interview,” through the alternately desperate and hilarious “Hotline,” to the riotous revelations of marital betrayals in “Central Park West”’ (ibid.). Problematically, for Variety, it is again Allen’s work that falls shortest within this triptych. Variety’s theatre critic described Allen’s piece as the one ‘which offers the most accomplished writing of the evening but also the most heartless’ (Gerard 1995). Whereas he does admit ‘I found “Central Park West” loathsome, others may see it as the height of sophistication’ (ibid.), taking exception mostly to the real-life echoes in Allen’s seemingly semi-autobiographical work. Many critics on the other hand identify the autobiography in Allen’s work as one of his merits, although he would deny it himself. Like many others, New York Times critic, Maureen Dowd argues that ‘it was the correspondence between Mr. Allen’s work and Mr. Allen’s life that made him so popular’ (1995).

Creative Overlap These are the direct interactions that May and Allen have had, and through these case studies one can read a great deal of crossover influence, to the point of evident ‘creative collaboration’. There are, in fact, aspects of both Elaine May’s and Woody Allen’s independent work that resemble one another, providing other demonstrable examples of influence. Two works that bare resemblance are May’s play Adult Entertainment (2002) and Allen’s film Mighty Aphrodite (1996). Allen’s f ilm reflects the tale of Pygmalion, as does Allen’s Elaine May vessel, Small Time Crooks. May’s play again stars her daughter in the lead role, this time as a porn star who, along with her co-stars, decides that they can write and produce their own pornographic film with the same artistic integrity as the classics, set in ancient Greece and based on the myth of Icarus. ‘Suddenly, to considerable comic effect, Frosty Moons (Jeannie Berlin), Vixen Fox (Mary Birdsong), Jimbo J (Eric Elice), and Heidi-the-Ho are having cracked discussions about everything from Death of a Salesman to Susan Sontag’ (Siegel and Siegel 2002). This resembles the social-climbing comedy of errors, Small Time Crooks, redolent of New Jersey native-come millionaire Frenchy as she tries, disastrously, to throw a swanky party before seeking high society lessons from Hugh Grant’s art dealer, David. The Pygmalion references here are not implicit as, after a relationship that turns passionate, David buys Frenchy a copy of

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Shaw’s book and inscribes it with ‘To my favourite Eliza, from your Professor Higgins. Love, David’. Mighty Aphrodite sees married couple Lenny and Amanda Weinrib, played by Allen and Helena Bonham Carter, adopt a child. Subsequently, Lenny becomes obsessed with finding the child’s biological mother, who, it turns out, is porn star Linda Ash, in an Academy Award-winning performance by Mira Sorvino. The plot here also becomes very Pygmalionesque when Lenny endeavours to help Linda abandon her career by buying off her pimp and setting her up with a new job so that when his son grows up and looks for his biological mother, he doesn’t find her a porn star. The whole thing is punctuated by a Greek chorus that proclaims the film’s narrative to be “a tale as Greek as fate itself”. Bailey observed that ‘the implicit identification of the chorus with Allen’s screen persona suggests that there is a more substantial justification for their presence than the anachronism-inspired laughs they provoke’ (2016: 217), tying the relevance of this film to Allen’s own personal life issues with his ex-partner, Mia Farrow’s adopted daughters, his subsequent marriage to Soon-Yi Previn and the alleged molestation. These texts – in their echoing reflections of Greek origins and synchronized exploration of the porn industry through the Pygmalion framework – demonstrate just how May and Allen have a tendency to function along almost synchronized lines. Whilst measurable influence is one thing, the readable impact that May has had on Allen’s work is much more significant. It is readily evident that Crisis in Six Scenes’ Kay Munsinger is the architect of the couple’s life, as Sydney complains, ‘Geez, you sit here with these brilliant notions and I carry them out’, and yet one is left to attempt to discern just how much of Woody Allen’s dialogue is the design of his occasional collaborator Elaine May, a performer to whom improvisation was so important that ‘she would go on forever if you let her’ (Rollins quoted in Nachman 2003: 342). To some extent, the question that this chapter has striven to answer is whether Elaine May is the redeeming success of Allen’s work. The contention to be made here is, having identified May’s own success in both filmmaking and on the stage, one might suggest that, although May is less prolific than Allen, she ought to be equally well-appreciated and well-received. In Allen’s work, one can easily observe that Elaine May is not just an occasional collaborator but a persistent and influential presence. Whilst this chapter has noted that Allen’s autobiography is what ‘made him so popular’ (Canby 1995: 17), for Death Defying Acts, Small Time Crooks, Relatively Speaking and Crisis in Six Scenes at the very least, it might equally be argued that it is the inimitable Elaine May that makes these texts so popular.

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Bibliography Bailey, Peter. (2016). The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky. Bailey, Peter J., and Sam B. Girgus. (Eds.) (2013). A Companion to Woody Allen. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. Bazin, André. (2001). On the politique des auteurs (April 1957). In Jim Hiller (Ed.), Cahiers Du Cinema Vol 1: The 1950s, Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave. London: Routledge. pp. 248–259. Björkman, Stig. (1995). Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In conversation with Stig Björkman. London: Faber & Faber. Brantley, Ben. (2002). Is She a Serious Actress? XXXtremely. The New York Times, 12 December, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/theater/theater-review-isshe-a-serious-actress-xxxtremely.html [Accessed 11 May 2020] Braudy, Susan. (1977). He’s Woody Allen’s 1‐1‐Silent Partner. The New York Times, 21 August, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/21/archives/hes-woody-allensnotsosilent-partner.html [Accessed 11 May 2020] Brown, Scott. (2011). O Brother. New York Magazine, 21 October, http://nymag.com/ arts/theater/reviews/relatively-speaking-brown-2011-10/ [Accessed 11 May 2020] Canby, Vincent. (1995). Death Defying Acts; Really a Jungle Out There, a Jungle of Urban Neuroses. The New York Times, 7 th March, https://www.nytimes. com/1995/03/07/theater/theater-review-death-defying-acts-really-jungle-therejungle-urban-neuroses.html [Accessed 11 May 2020] Caryn, James. (2018). The Fireworks of Elaine May. The New York Times, 24 February, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A142459041/ITOF?u=urjy&sid=ITOF&xid =49d9c1cd [Accessed 26 March 2018] Checkhov, Michael. (2002). To the Actor. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Mitchell S. (1973). Short Notices. Film Quarterly, Vol. 26, Issue 4, 60–61. Del Signore, John. (2011). Theater Review: Relatively Speaking. The Gothamist, 23 October, http://gothamist.com/2011/10/23/theater_review_relatively_speaking. php [Accessed 11 May 2020] Dowd, Maureen. (1986). The Four Women of Hannah and Her Sisters. The New York Times, 2 February, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ books/97/02/23/reviews/farrow-harrah.html?scp=32&sq=dianne%2520wiest &st=cse [Accessed 11 May 2018] —. (1995). Auteur as Spin Doctor. The New York Times, 1st October, https://www. nytimes.com/1995/10/01/opinion/liberties-auteur-as-spin-doctor.html [Accessed 11 May 2020] Dyer, Richard. (2009). Stars. London: BFI.

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Fisher, James. (2014). Schlemiel on Broadway: Woody Allen’s Jewish Identity in his Stage Plays from Don’t Drink The Water to Honeymoon Hotel. In Vincent Brook and Marat Brindberg (Eds.), Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the films and plays of Woody Allen. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, pp. 235–258 French, Phillip. (2000). Film of the Week: Too Many Cookies… The Observer, 3 December, https://www.theguardian.com/observer/screen/story/0,6903,405917,00. html [Accessed 11 May 2020] Gerard, Jeremy. (1995). Death Defying Acts. Variety, 12 March, http://variety.com/1995/ film/reviews/death-defying-acts-2-1200441136/ [Accessed 11 May 2020] Grindberg, Marat. (2014). The Birth of a Hebrew Tragedy: Casandra’s Dream as a Morality Play in the Context of Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. In Vincent Brook and Marat Brindberg (Eds.), Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the films and plays of Woody Allen. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. pp. 37–57. Isherwood, Charles. (2012). Each Family, Tortured in Its Own Way. The New York Times, 29 January, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/theater/reviews/relatively-speaking-at-brooks-atkinson-theater-review.html [Accessed 11 May 2020] John-Steiner, Vera. (2000). Creative Collaboration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelley, Ken. (1976). A Conversation with the Real Woody Allen. In Robert Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (Eds.), Woody Allen: Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2006, pp. 7–28. Koester, Megan. (2016). You May Not Care to Watch It but Crisis in Six Scenes is Woody Allen’s Best, Most Relevant Work in Decades. The Stranger, 5 October, https://www.thestranger.com/film/2016/10/05/24598264/you-may-not-careto-watch-it-but-crisis-in-six-scenes-is-woody-allens-best-most-relevant-workin-decades [Accessed 11 May 2018] Lahr, John. (1996). The Imperfectionist. In Robert Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (Eds.), Woody Allen: Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2006 pp.143 – 168. Lyne, Charlie. (2016). Crisis in Six Scenes: Woody Allen’s TV show is proof he’s finally lost the plot. The Guardian, 28 September, https://www.theguardian. com/film/2016/sep/28/crisis-in-six-scenes-woody-allen-miley-cyrus [Accessed 11 May 2020] Mock, Roberta. (2007). Jewish women on stage, film and television. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nachman, Gerald. (2003). Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s. New York: Back Stage Books. Pearce, Celia. (2016). Roleplay, Improvisations and Emergent Authorship. In George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Critical improvisation Studies, vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Relatively Speaking (New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., [2011]2013). Saraiya, Soniya. (2016). TV Review: Woody Allen’s Amazon Comedy Crisis in Six Scenes. Variety, 29 September, http://variety.com/2016/tv/reviews/crisis-insix-scenes-review-woody-allen-miley-cyrus-amazon-1201874121/ [Accessed 11 May 2020] Schickel, Richard. (2003). Woody Allen: A Life in Film. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee. Siegel, Barbara, and Scott Siegel. (2002). Adult Entertainment. Theatermania, 11 December, https://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/reviews/ adult-entertainment_2898.html [Accessed 11 May 2020 ] Szlezák, Klara, and D.E. Wynter. (Eds.) (2015). Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Filmography A New Leaf. DVD. Directed by Elaine May. USA: Paramount. 1971 Annie Hall. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1977 Biloxi Blues. DVD. Directed by Mike Nichols. USA: Universal. 1988 Crisis in Six Scenes. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Amazon Studios. 2016 Ishtar. DVD. Directed by Elaine May. USA: Columbia. 1987 Labyrinth. DVD. Directed by Jim Henson. USA: TriStar. 1986 Manhattan. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: United Artists. 1979 Mighty Aphrodite. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: Miramax. 1996 Mikey and Nicky. DVD. Directed by Elaine May. USA: Paramount. 1976 Play it Again, Sam. DVD. Directed by Herbert Ross. USA: Paramount. 1973 Primary Colours. DVD. Directed by Mike Nichols. USA: Universal. 1998 Small Time Crooks. DVD. Directed by Woody Allen. USA: DreamWorks. 2000 Such Good Friends. DVD. Directed by Otto Preminger. USA: Paramount. 1971 The Birdcage. DVD. Directed by Mike Nichols. USA: United Artists. 1996 The Graduate. DVD. Directed by Mike Nichols. USA: United Artists. 1967 The Heartbreak Kid. DVD. Directed by Elaine May. USA: Palomar. 1972

About the Author Martin Hall is a Senior Lecturer and the Course Leader for Film Studies and Media & Communication for the School of Humanities, Religion and Philosophy at York St. John University. He has published widely on the work of Woody Allen and has published on many other aspects of the American cinema with a focus on the 1960s and 1970s.

12 Keaton and Allen Collaboration and the Screwball Couple in Annie Hall and Manhattan Murder Mystery Claire Mortimer Abstract This chapter examines the working relationship between Allen and Keaton, questioning her status as a ‘muse’ and exploring how her performance style and creative involvement in their f ilms together evolved over a quarter of a century. This chapter will explore how their work together was informed by the tradition of screwball couples, inflected by the shifting discourses regarding gender and ageing during the final decades of the twentieth century. Despite Keaton’s prolific film career independently of Allen since the 1960s, which encompassed many celebrated roles, she continues to be labelled as Allen’s muse. Keywords: comedy, partnership, age

Film academic Rebecca Harrison (2018) passionately argued that a revision of the film canon was long overdue to challenge the patriarchal culture of the industry, particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the exposure of the extent to which gender inequality was ingrained in the abusive culture of Hollywood. Harrison argued that it was time to ‘look beyond the “auteur” and consider the hidden labour of women in seemingly male-dominated projects’. Her article goes on to namecheck a shockingly long list of male directors, producers and actors who have been accused of sexual abuse in the press, including Woody Allen, whose resistance to the accusations made against him have increasingly rendered him notorious rather than a genius. This chapter aims to challenge the orthodoxy by questioning the creative collaboration between Allen and Diane Keaton, a relationship that has rested on the status of Allen as an

Hall, Martin R. (ed.), Women in the Work of Woody Allen. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463722926_ch12

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auteur of independent American cinema and Keaton as his muse. Over 40 years since the release of Annie Hall (1977), the film that consolidated this artist/muse dynamic, Keaton continues to perform the role of Allen’s muse in her support of the beleaguered director in the face of allegations of abuse and in perpetuating his status as a ‘genius’ (YouTube 2014). The muse is a problematic role, regarded by feminists with cynicism in perpetuating the essential objectification of women and negating female labour in the creative process. The films made with Keaton were to define Allen’s career, being the benchmark against which all his later films would be judged. Although Keaton is labelled as Allen’s muse to this day, it is clear that she made a crucial contribution to their films together. As one fan posted on YouTube: ‘Where would Woody be without Diane Keaton?’ The enduring myth of the muse is endemic of old, pre-#MeToo Hollywood: the patriarchal world of Harvey Weinstein’s casting couch, heartthrob stars who are handy with their fists, and auteurs who sustain their myth through the labour of the muse, labour that involves emotional support and providing a crutch for their sullied reputation. Annie Hall was considered a radical film of its time, but it perpetuates myths of creativity that sustain the patriarchal culture of American cinema. Woody Allen has built a film career around the notion of the muse, but a close consideration of Keaton’s roles in Annie Hall and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) reveals how much he owes to her. This chapter argues that the myth of the auteur and his muse obscures the extent of Keaton’s contribution to their creative partnership by perpetuating a narrative of the woman as an inspiration who is ultimately passive, being merely a canvas onto which the filmmaker can project their art. Keaton’s contribution to Annie Hall has been sidelined – not only by critics and scholars but also by Keaton herself, whose generosity and humility serve to eclipse her creative contribution and shore up the status of Allen as auteur. This chapter will consider how the artist/muse relationship is revisited after a hiatus of fifteen years, under very different circumstances, with Keaton being cast at the last minute in Manhattan Murder Mystery. Manhattan Murder Mystery is a comedy of remarriage, not only in terms of its screwball credentials but also reuniting the onscreen couple of Diane Keaton and Woody Allen sixteen years after Annie Hall, a romcom that resonated with a generation. Keaton stepped into Mia Farrow’s shoes at short notice in taking the female lead, standing by Allen when his affair with Farrow’s teenage adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn had come to light. Keaton had established herself as a successful creative force independently of Allen. Keaton’s casting had a deeper resonance regarding their creative

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partnership, with the film being based on the original premise for Annie Hall, inevitably positioning the audience to compare the middle-aged married couple with their younger counterparts. This was a move that helped to protect Allen’s status as a director, sustaining his career at a difficult time, with one review of Manhattan Murder Mystery commenting that the director ‘has obviously survived his gift for self-destruction’ (Quart 1993: 64). Allen has credited Keaton with having had a deep impact on his work, in particular his female characters, reinforcing her status as that of the muse. Allen said of their work together that ‘the films were designed to be about me and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say she wipes me off the screen, the movies turned out to be her’s’ (Shone 2015). The notion of the muse has evolved over time, with its basis in Greek mythology and the nine goddesses responsible for inspiring the various areas of the arts. Central to this creative dynamic are questions of gender, with a muse being conceived of as female and the artist as male; the dynamic being essentially patriarchal. The woman’s role in art is to inspire; the artist is to create in response to the female. In this respect, the masculine is aligned with artistry and creation, whereas the feminine is essentially passive and inherently objectified. There is a spiritual, even divine aspect to this relationship, which embeds archaic conceptions of the idealized woman. Rodin spoke of the function of the artist’s muse in such terms: earthly angels […] For an artist, a soft woman is his most powerful dispatch, she is holy, she rises up in our hearts, in our genius, and in our force, she is a divine sower who sows love in our hearts in order that we can put it back a hundred times into our work. (quoted in Roe 2010: 101)

For Rodin, the female muse is other and sacred, yet a tool and conduit for the artist’s work. The relationship between artist and muse is characterized by the intertwining of personal and public, creativity and the intimate. The personal becomes public through the work of art, yet the personal is more than merely an intimate relationship and becomes sanctified through the artistic process, as the muse provides ‘inspiration’ for the artist. Such a relationship is characterized by being long-lasting, not merely a one-off, the intensity of such a relationship being publicly charted through the means of the art that results from it. This gendered rendering of the creative process is contiguous with the patriarchal tenets of auteur theory, the lone male artist being the centre of creativity, a monolithic force of genius whose work qualifies as

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art. Francine Prose notes that the job description for the muse involves ‘nurturing, sustaining, supporting, encouraging’ (2003: 12), conforming to a traditional idea of femininity. The concept of the muse has rightly been questioned by feminists for removing agency from the woman who is typically cast in this role, relying wholly on the notion of objectification, with the muse being passive and invariably defined by their appearance and relationship to the male artist. It is clear that with Keaton and Allen, the label of muse oversimplifies and removes all agency from Keaton beyond being the feminine ideal. Yet she herself perpetuates this perception of her role in their work due to her modesty about her work and her wholehearted endorsement of Allen’s status as a great director. This problematic dynamic has been further complicated by the unresolved scandal that continues to hang over Allen, leading some to question Keaton’s loyalty in continuing to speak out in support of him.1 Allen is nothing but obdurate, producing new films with regularity, attracting the biggest names in Hollywood, many of whom then seek to put distance between themselves and the troubled/troubling director. Dylan Farrow targeted those actors who had collaborated with Allen, asking them how they could do this in the light of her revelations. One of these collaborators was Diane Keaton, with her proximity to this controversial figure somewhat overshadowing her own career and public status. The two are indelibly associated with each other, with Keaton accepting a Golden Globes award on the behalf of Allen in 2014 and, in turn, accepting the American Film Institute lifetime achievement award from Allen in 2017. Her acceptance speech for the AFI award indicated the importance of Annie Hall to Keaton’s persona, choosing to sing ‘Seems Like Old Times’ in tribute to her role in the film. The Vanity Fair film podcast noted of Keaton’s relationship with Allen that ‘nobody can be a better kind of character witness … but on the other hand that in itself is kinda creepy’ (2016). Keaton has involved herself in this ongoing controversy by publicly speaking out in defence of Allen, most recently posting a tweet in 2018 declaring ‘Woody Allen is my friend and I continue to believe in him’, directing people to an interview with Allen dealing with the allegations from 1992. In 2017, Dylan Farrow addressed the actor directly in an open letter published in The New York Times, asking ‘You knew me when I was a little girl, Diane Keaton. Have you forgotten me?’ Yet Keaton has continued to fulfil the role of the muse by offering unwavering support for Allen. 1 Judd Apatow responded to Keaton’s tweet defending Allen against Dylan Farrow’s allegations in 2018, demonstrating his strong disagreement and condemning Allen’s behaviour.

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The Importance of Keaton Keaton’s status as a national icon was formally recognized by the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017. A host of stars has attested to her importance, including Emma Stone, Reese Witherspoon, Rachel McAdams and Lisa Kudrow, and she has been celebrated as a role model for younger female actors. Film Comment designated Keaton as ‘important’, adding that ‘she caught the feminist moment more than any other leading Hollywood actress’ in her roles and performances during the 1970s and 1980s, recognizing her ‘enduring charm and iconic power’ with an acting and directing career that has endured over several decades (Fuller 2007: 34). Graham Fuller makes the point that she is far from merely an excellent comedic actor, praising her for her dramatic range, arguing that her finest performances have been away from film comedy. As Deborah Jermyn points out, Keaton has continued to remain relevant to the experiences of her generation, there being ‘still something of the counter-cultural icon about her’ (2012: 49). Keaton’s persona is constructed around her authenticity, having been frank about her insecurities and struggles with mental health; she remains defiantly single, having raised two adopted children by herself, and she has been outspoken in her resistance to cosmetic surgery as she has aged. She has written three autobiographical books which add to this sense of authenticity, her persona being implicit in the cover notes of the most recent, Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty (2014), detailing ‘a candid, hilarious, and deeply affecting look at beauty, aging, and the importance of staying true to yourself – no matter what anyone else thinks’. Jermyn observes that Keaton carries ‘a heightened sense of history’ given her sustained career, enabling ‘numerous reflexive connections across her films’ (2012: 37). Hilary Radner ascribes to Keaton a persona that embodies ‘serial authenticity’ – the ability to undergo transformation while remaining recognizably herself, having demonstrated ‘various permutations of femininity’ during a career ‘exceptional for its longevity’ (2010: 173). Her star persona is such that her performance style and characters are enmeshed with the ‘real’ Diane Keaton, making her consistently relatable and distinctive across four decades of filmmaking. There is an essential ambiguity to Keaton’s later career persona that centres on attributes that suggest a feminist mindset, at odds with a modesty and apparent shyness that defined her early career and performances. Radner notes how any suggestion of feminist threat represented by the character of Annie Hall was countered by Keaton’s ‘fey charm’, whereas her characters of the 1980s were aggressive career women (173). It is the

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younger Keaton who appears to fit more comfortably into the status of the muse, fulfilling the requirements regarding youth and beauty but also as an intimate of the artist. Her ditsyness and hesitancy worked to assure her a regular slot on the foremost American talk show and slotted perfectly into the neurotic world of Allen’s work of the era. Keaton tended to judge her own career by her association with ‘great’ men, seeing herself as a cipher for their work. In her autobiography, Keaton reflected of the 1980s that ‘for the most part’ her ‘contribution to the art of filmmaking wasn’t particularly inspired’, with a dearth of substantial roles. She added that, in the wake of her work with Allen and then Beatty: ‘Without a great man writing and directing for me, I was a mediocre movie star at best’ (2011: 150). Keaton’s generosity towards her male co-stars and directors reinforces her status as muse and minimizes the extent of her contribution to her roles. Nevertheless, Keaton increasingly took control over her career in the 1980s and 1990s, building on her experiences working with Allen and Beatty, to learn and develop her own film projects.

When Woody Met Diane Allen’s films were deeply enmeshed with the personal from the 1960s to the early 1990s, foregrounding his intimate relationships by casting his ‘muse’ in a central role. His career is delineated in phases that coincide with his relationships with women – there is the Louise Lasser stage, the Diane Keaton period, followed by the Mia Farrow stage, and then the Soon-Yi Previn years. The latter stage can be broken down into periods within which Allen has worked closely with particular female actors, including Scarlett Johansson, Emma Stone and Penelope Cruz, continuing to cultivate a working dynamic centred on the myth of the artist and his muse.2 The muse is ultimately a mirror for the artist to project his own idealized notion of femininity, according to Prose (2003: 22). This narrative of the creative process implies an appropriation of the actor’s identity, with the female inspiration being ‘owned’ by the artist. Keaton was a relative unknown when she first started working with Allen. Having made her Broadway debut in Hair in 1968, their professional and personal association started when she was cast for the stage version of Play It Again, Sam in 1969. Keaton 2 When Emma Stone was cast in more than one of Allen’s films, Elle magazine announced a ‘strict muse watch’ in an article entitled ‘Emma Stone, muse?’ https://www.elle.com/uk/fashion/ celebrity-style/articles/a531/emma-stone-woody-allen-new-film-muse-magic-in-the-moonlight/.

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made three films with Allen before Annie Hall: these were Play It Again, Sam (1972), Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975). Annie Hall was made a couple of years after the end of their relationship, with Keaton starring in two further Allen films, Interiors (1978) and Manhattan (1979), as well as appearing in a cameo role in Radio Days (1987). Allen spoke of Keaton’s influence on his work as an inspirational force, even continuing well beyond their relationship: ‘Her imprimatur was very meaningful to me, because I felt she was in touch with something deeper than I was in touch with […] I always rely on her. It’s always the most important screening I have of any of my movies, when she’s in town’ (Bjorkman 1993: 52). He comments on her ‘flawless instincts … she had so much talent’. Allen credited Keaton’s influence in helping him to write for women; for him, Annie Hall was the first good woman’s role he had ever written: ‘When I started going out with Diane, I started to write parts for her and started getting better at writing parts for women […] Since then, all my good parts have been for women.’ Indeed, Allen’s female roles have come to be cited as a defining attribute of his work, with Kate Winslet commenting on her part in Wonder Wheel (2017): I think on some level Woody is a woman […] I just think he’s very in touch with that side of himself. He understands the female characters he creates exceptionally well […] His female characters are always so rich and large and honest in terms of how they’re feeling and he just knows how to write dialogue for them to communicate all that. (quoted in Miller 2017)

Allen’s insistence on Keaton’s role as the inspiration for the female characters in his work establishes her as a muse who gifts the secret of her gender to the artist. This dynamic is writ large in Emma Stone’s comments about the creative partnership between the director and his muse, speculating that ‘[Allen] is the biggest fan of Diane Keaton […] I think Woody would like to be Diane Keaton in a Woody Allen movie’ (quoted in Miller 2014). The label of muse conceals the labour of Diane Keaton in their work together, as is indirectly acknowledged by Allen himself. Keaton continues to be defined by her performance in Annie Hall, with the boundaries between character and persona being blurred. As Film Comment notes, it ‘was Annie’s Keatonness which made her unique’; the actor made the role and hence the enduring status of the film (Fuller 2007: 32). Keaton did little to rectify the perception of Allen as the genius behind the film, commenting in her autobiography that he was responsible for ‘[e]very idea, every choice, every decision’ in the making of Annie Hall, despite having elaborated at length how the film was based on herself and their relationship as well as hinting at

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the extent to which she determined the performance, dialogue and costume (2011: 126). In 2014, in an interview on the Today Show, Keaton was adamant that Allen had made her career with Annie Hall: ‘I don’t know what would have happened to me without him. I mean he wrote Annie Hall […] It was the greatest gift that was ever given me by anyone professionally.’ (YouTube 2014). Yet it is clear that Keaton is responsible for ‘writing’ a character who would not exist but for her, a character who is her, a version that is fictionalized and shaped to some extent by Allen and Marshall Brickman. It is clear that ownership of the role of Annie was very much Keaton’s, with Allen’s direction allowing her the space to develop the character, but a character and narrative that was inspired by Keaton. Her achievement in terms of performance was marked by being awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress. Annie Hall is about the doomed relationship between Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and Annie, told by Alvy in hindsight, as he reflects on where it went wrong. The film follows how neurotic Alvy meets the ditsy Annie, with both of them becoming increasingly uncertain about the relationship, Alvy paying for Annie to have therapy. Annie develops a promising career as a singer and moves to Los Angeles, with Alvy flying out to see her and resulting in the end of their relationship. The film finishes with Alvy rehearsing a scene in his new play, which is clearly based on his relationship with Annie but has a happy ending. The film is informed by the Pygmalion narrative, with an older man wishing to mould the younger woman into the feminine ideal, evoking of course the artist/muse relationship but with the woman as the object of the creative project. Alvy starts to try to change Annie, through films, reading and therapy, leading to the unforeseen consequence that Annie is empowered to question their relationship and pursue her singing career in California, leaving Alvy for a new Svengali, a record producer. Mitchell points out that the film has Annie exchanging one Pygmalion for another in California, as she forms a relationship with a record producer, apparently modelled on Warren Beatty, reflecting Keaton’s real life romantic involvement with the actor (Mitchell 2001: 44). The twist in Annie Hall, as Christopher Knight points out, is that Alvy ‘is the pathetic Pygmalion, left only with his art, choosing, “once again,” the perfect woman, which is to say the perfectly submissive woman’ (2004: 221). He can only find his ideal woman in his art, with the film finishing with him rehearsing his new play in which the Annie figure doesn’t leave him. As is often the case with Allen’s films, fact and fiction are inextricably linked. Allen was adept at drawing on the off-screen lives of his female collaborators for inspiration, in addition to his own experiences. Louise

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Lasser, Allen’s second wife, claimed that Interiors (1978) was inspired by her family, according to Tim Carroll (1993: 118). Deborah Jermyn points out the extent to which Keaton was deemed not to be actually ‘acting’ as such in Annie Hall but merely being herself (2012: 39). Indeed Keaton, when reflecting on her Academy Award, stated that she knew that she ‘didn’t deserve it’ for merely ‘playing an affable version of myself’ (Keaton 2011: 139). The implication of this detracts from Keaton’s creative contribution in developing the role and the extent to which her persona defined the character but also reflects the extent to which authenticity is at the core of her persona. There was considerable crossover between real life and fiction, not just in the narrative of the relationship but also in the distinctive style of dressing, which Keaton has maintained across the decades, and even the name, with ‘Hall’ being based on Keaton’s actual name ‘Diane Hall’. Keaton’s contribution to the character of Annie Hall was particularly evident when looking at her star persona at the time and how she cultivated a specific image that played well in boosting her public profile. Joseph Arton points out that she had established herself as a star in the early 1970s, her star persona not being ‘defined exclusively’ by her relationship and work with Allen, having starred in The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) (2010: 74–75). She was a regular guest on The Tonight Show, appearing nine times by 1975, her popularity resting on her persona as the ‘ditsy brunette’. Keaton was essentially a foil for the host, Johnny Carson, who controls the interviews and carefully maintains an avuncular persona, constantly referring to her shyness. Keaton comes across as lacking confidence, verging on inarticulate and neurotic, displaying a hesitancy and coyness that was to be integral to her film persona in her early work with Allen. Keaton was to reflect much later that, much like Annie, she had been insecure and ‘did grope for words’ (Keaton 2011: 128). She realized that the flaws that she had struggled with as a child were turned to her advantage in adult life: a hesitancy, and always, always the mangling of my sentences, the stammers, the ums, the you-knows, the oh-wells, the I-don’t-knows. I was inept, inexact, and imprecise. I would never have believed you if you had told me that this ineptness would help me later on, but somehow it did and I made my way. (2014: xix)

This persona spilled over into her performances in Allen’s early films and into interviews, with one interview remarking on how Keaton was like the ‘kooky comedy characters’ of the films, speaking ‘slowly, shyly and

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softly’ whilst nervously playing with her hair (Klemesrud 1977). She further cultivates Allen’s status as her mentor for giving her a voice, for having suggested therapy, just as Alvy did for Annie, and for the ‘talking cure’, which was key to overcoming her demons, in particular her eating disorder. Her recollection of these sessions evokes the inarticulacy for which she had become famed on The Tonight Show: ‘All those disjointed words and half sentences, all those complaining, awkward phrases shaping incomplete monologues blurted out’ (Keaton 2011: 91). The narrative of Allen and Keaton’s creative and personal relationship fits with the Pygmalion template, the muse being shaped into the ideal woman, although the notion that the woman gains a voice is at odds with the presumed passivity of the muse. This telling of the Keaton/Allen relationship strips the actor of her autonomy, denigrating her own input in her performances and crediting Allen for having ‘created’ her success. Although her star persona reinforced notions of girlishness and naivety which fed into the notion of her as a muse rather than a creative force in her own right, it was clear that as an actor she created characters such as Annie Hall – who resonated with audiences for their authenticity – by drawing on her own experiences, quirks and talents. Manhattan Murder Mystery Much like Annie and Alvy, Keaton moved on from Allen both professionally and romantically to build a career independently of her erstwhile ‘mentor’. Nevertheless, by the early 1980s Keaton was still famed for being a muse rather than an artist in her own right, not only for her relationship with Allen but also with Warren Beatty, who cast her as the female lead in his Academy Award-winning Reds (1981). The sense that Keaton was not being credited for her contribution to these collaborations caused one reporter to assert that ‘Allen and Beatty may have learned more from her than she ever learned from them. […] Keaton is a wild and rare and precious original in American movies and that her well-developed aesthetic sense may well have exceeded, in some ways, those of her old boyfriends’ (Simons 1995). Keaton had enjoyed a prolific acting career after her collaboration partnership with Allen, earning critical plaudits for performances in films as diverse as Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977), Reds and Baby Boom (1987). She was keen to develop her creative range as an artist by undertaking various directing projects, a screenwriting course, alongside pursuing photography projects. By the time she was cast in Manhattan Murder Mystery, she was an experienced, middle-aged creative force with a sustained independent

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career who did not fit easily back into the role of muse. She had continued to develop as an actor, not being confined to comedy but extending her range, having already demonstrated her versatility in films as diverse as The Godfather series, Looking for Mr Goodbar and Reds. She was in demand, finding a winning formula working with Nancy Meyers after the success of Baby Boom, starring in Father of the Bride (1991) – which was to be followed by a sequel in 1995 – and Something’s Gotta Give (2003). Meyers created substantial roles for Keaton, which drew on her talent as a comedy actor and made her a household name with a younger generation, the films finding huge success at the box office, with Keaton being nominated for an Academy Award for Something’s Gotta Give. Manhattan Murder Mystery marked the end of Allen’s work with Mia Farrow, who had starred in twelve of his films between 1982 and 1992, with Keaton being cast to replace Farrow. This proved to be a good move for Allen in helping to distract from the controversy generated by his private life. The revival of the Keaton/Allen partnership referenced a more auspicious stage in his career when he was celebrated as an auteur of American independent cinema, with Annie Hall winning four Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Manhattan Murder Mystery is dominated by Keaton’s performance, resurrecting the dynamics of her partnership with Allen in Annie Hall, reuniting the two with screenwriter Brickman, who had worked on Sleeper (1973), Annie Hall and Manhattan (1979). Fellow stars and crew commented on the chemistry between Keaton and Allen on set and their good-humoured relationship, in stark contrast to the torrent of negative press concerning Allen which dominated the media (Mitchell 2001: 122). Farrow had been typically cast as characters who conformed to the template defining most of Keaton’s roles with Allen, with her first role as Ariel in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) having been initially conceived as being for Keaton. Dinitia Smith saw Farrow’s persona as an inflection of Allen, playing a ‘feminine surrogate of himself, perpetually young, innocent and bewildered’ (1996: 1). Smith could be describing Keaton’s persona during her time working with Allen, suggesting an intense relationship in which the boundaries between personal and professional, muse and artist, male and female are blurred. The artist’s choice of muse is intimately related to their own identity, with Smith commenting that ‘[t]he relationship can be so strong that one can hardly separate the roles of participants’ (1). The partnership can be judged to be reciprocal and symbiotic in its nature on the one hand, but it also suggests a passivity on the behalf of the actor who is slotted into a template in which the director’s persona subsumes the female

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lead. This dynamic seems to be central to Allen’s working relationship with his female leads, as suggested by Emma Stone’s comment about Allen’s desire to actually be Keaton. The later film revisits Annie Hall in many ways, with Allen collaborating with Brickman on both films. The central concept of Manhattan Murder Mystery, as with so many of Allen’s films, is nostalgia, with Allen revisiting the original plot for Annie Hall. Annie Hall had originally had a working title of ‘Anhedonia’, interweaving a murder mystery narrative with scenes featuring a comedian (Allen) reflecting on his life. This had been jettisoned in favour of the focus on Annie and Alvy’s relationship, with Keaton’s character becoming of central importance to the narrative, as indicated by the final title. Manhattan Murder Mystery reworks the murder plot, and again Keaton’s character became central to the narrative as the project developed. Keaton and Allen play a middle-aged couple, Carol and Larry, struggling with an empty nest when their son goes to university. Carol yearns for excitement and change, and when a neighbour dies unexpectedly, she becomes convinced that the widower was the murderer. Carol’s enthusiasm for detective work draws her closer to the couple’s newly single friend, Ted (Alan Alda), much to Larry’s disapproval. Larry is conservative, neurotic and unadventurous, warning his wife to ‘save a little craziness for menopause’. Ultimately, he is dragged into the pursuit of the murderer, bringing the couple closer together as Carol’s suspicions are proved correct. The temptation to read Manhattan Murder Mystery in the light of Allen’s artistic and personal trajectory is compelling, much as with Annie Hall. Marriages gone stale; a man murders his wife to be with a younger woman – a man whose other passion is his ageing cinema. Carol’s pursuit of a dalliance with Ted before returning to Larry can, at a push, be considered as rather apt given Keaton’s resumption of her creative partnership with Allen. The difference between the personae of Keaton and Farrow led Allen to swap round the intended roles, with Carol originally written for Farrow as ‘the straight man, a solemn spoilsport, on the imminent verge of an anxiety attack’. Keaton was swapped into what had been Allen’s role, playing the ‘more buoyant, fanatical half of the partnership’ (Lax 1991: 238). As a consequence, it is Keaton’s character who becomes the instigator and energy at the heart of the narrative, whereas Larry follows in her wake. The roles foregrounded Keaton’s performance skills as a comedy actress, rather than Allen, who maintains a more low-key presence, commensurate with Larry’s innate conservatism and fear of risk. Keaton dominates the screen throughout much of the film, particularly in the first half of the narrative

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when we follow Carol taking the initiative in her investigation into the death of Mrs. House, following her hunch despite Larry’s misgivings. Keaton figures large in a majority of scenes, with Allen being absent as she gets drawn further into the mystery, choosing the company of Ted, who listens to her theories and accompanies her on stakeouts. The handheld camerawork helps to foreground the energy of Carol, mirroring Keaton’s characteristic skittishness which animates the character. Shots are framed to foreground Keaton’s reactions rather than Allen’s, as with the opening shot of the couple when Carol is demonstrating her boredom at the hockey, rolling her eyes and grimacing. Much as Larry is a bystander in their marriage, Allen’s performance provides a framework for Keaton. In switching roles, Keaton takes the role designated for the artist – whereas Allen takes that originally intended for Farrow, a muse whose influence has waned and grown stale. On top of awarding his former muse the greater role in the film, Allen felt that she also ‘made this part funnier than I wrote it’, describing her as ‘equal to the greatest screen comediennes we’ve ever had … she brings out the best in everybody. She has the kind of personality that lights up the project’ (quoted in Bjorkman 1993: 257). Keaton brought her own creative vision to her performance of the role, having the confidence of her autonomy as an artist in her own right to develop the character.

Comedy of Remarriage Age, the fear of obsolescence – both professional and personal – and mid-life traumas were fundamental to the making of the film. Age is a central theme in the film, not only in how characters deal with a marriage grown stale in middle age but also in how Allen and Keaton revive a working relationship after a significant time apart, Keaton having been displaced as Allen’s muse. Manhattan Murder Mystery is a telling conflation of Allen’s two most influential ‘muses’, Farrow and Keaton, articulating middle aged angst and nostalgia for their past selves. The revival and reversal of the dynamics of Keaton and Allen’s working relationship were embedded in the very bones of Manhattan Murder Mystery, being a comedy of remarriage, whereas Annie Hall had been a nervous romance with the couple struggling with commitment and their attitudes to love. The comedy of remarriage is driven by the narrative impetus to reunite the couple after being apart, in this particular case reviving a marriage gone stale. Celestino Deleyto observed the prevalence of the theme of couples dealing with waning sexual desire in Allen’s films with Farrow in the 1990s, such as Another Woman (1988) and Husbands and

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Wives (1992) (1998: 139). In Manhattan Murder Mystery, this theme becomes central to the murder plot, with Mr. House murdering his wife to replace her with his younger mistress. The investigation into the murder of Mrs. House becomes the impetus for rekindling their marriage, with Carol taking the lead and Larry needing to overcome his nervous nature and join his wife on her adventure. Carol thrives on the excitement, declaring ‘I’m dizzy with freedom. This the craziest thing I’ve done.’ Their married life is evoked by the repeated bedroom scenes, with the couple being very much the ‘pair of comfortable old shoes’ feared by Carol. The divide between the couple is endemic in their contrasting attitudes to ageing. Whereas Carol has plans for a new career and is keen to try new things, Larry professes that he would prefer to ‘atrophy’ rather than exercise. After first meeting her neighbours, Carol is fearful that she and Larry ‘will become like them, a dull, ageing couple’. The revival of their marriage is commensurate with the rediscovery of shared ‘playtime’, the couple needing to learn about ageing successfully together. In Annie Hall, the couple lose their capacity to enjoy play together by the end of the film, their differences being too great, whereas Manhattan Murder Mystery reverses this narrative, with the middle-aged couple becoming childlike again, the final scene having them walking and laughing together, choosing each other over any competing attractions. Carol’s pursuit of Mrs. House’s murderer leads her into illicit spaces, undertaking dangerous missions and taking on different identities. She embraces danger and manifests her independence, choosing the company of another man initially before becoming dangerously close to each other. It is the danger of losing Carol that forces Larry to join her and cross the threshold into this world of ‘play’, sharing a series of increasingly dangerous escapades before proving Mr. House’s guilt. The film is animated by nostalgia, the idea itself being a revival of a writing partnership and concept from the high point of Allen’s film career in the 1970s. This nostalgia is embodied in the casting of Keaton, drawing on her status as a former muse for Allen. Nostalgia as a concept necessitates reflection regarding ageing and change – we dwell on the past and its relationship with the now. Keaton and Allen’s performance as a middle-aged married couple evokes memories of their last outing as a couple in Annie Hall, inviting the audience to draw parallels with Alvy and Annie, gratifying their fantasies as to ‘what if they had got together…’ Entertainment Weekly highlighted this obvious parallel, describing the couple as what ‘Alvy Singer and Annie Hall might have become had they gotten married and outgrown their shrinks’ (Gleiberman 1993). Although circumstances had resulted in the film relying heavily on the reunion of Allen and Keaton to revive Allen’s flagging status,

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it resulted in some frustration that what the audience wanted was just a sequel to Annie Hall, not a murder mystery, with Janet Maslin writing that ‘it would be far more interesting to watch these two work out the aftermath of “Annie Hall”’ (1993: 13). Rolling Stone magazine observed ‘TV and video have locked them in perpetual youth, sexually sparring through Sleeper or Love and Death’ (Travers 1993). As Jermyn pointed out with regards to Keaton’s later life romcom roles, ‘nostalgia for the young Keaton […] makes her a particularly apt woman star for the mature romcom’ (2012: 47). This appeal is redoubled by reviving her partnership with Allen, with Jermyn adding that the romcom ‘is a genre in which a sense of nostalgia is deeply embedded, both as a structuring sentiment in how its stories are told and often as an explicit theme’ (2012: 48). The evidence of ageing and the evolution of their personae since the 1970s inform the performances and audience response thereto. Reviews celebrated the reunion of Allen and Keaton, one reviewer betraying an irritation with Farrow and her ‘dishrag mopiness’ in contrast to Keaton’s ‘smiling radiance’, at odds with the real-life narrative of Farrow as a victim of Allen’s betrayal (Gleiberman 1993). The reviews were unanimous in praising Keaton’s performance, with Entertainment Weekly commenting on how she only gets better with age, ‘Keaton’s smiling radiance has only deepened with the years’ (ibid.). Not only did the film attract audiences because of the reunion of Keaton and Allen on screen, but its reception was inevitably weighted with a morbid fascination of how the public drama of Allen’s private life had played out in the film, with Frank Rich noting that Allen looked ‘tired and drawn’ in some scenes (1993). Keaton’s performance as Carol overwhelms Allen’s performance as the hapless Larry, reviving the dynamics of their screwball partnership and the vivacity and charisma of her role as Annie Hall.

Conclusion Keaton has had a career that has elevated her to the status of icon – in terms of longevity, her achievements and collaborations with other artists. Keaton has sustained her status through her defiant stance regarding ageing, marriage, her persona and her roles being a mirror for key developments in the women’s rights movement from the 1970s onwards. It was Keaton’s persona and performance that made Annie Hall, her contribution being more than merely Woody Allen’s muse. Nevertheless, she has actively cultivated this reading of their creative collaboration throughout her career, as has Allen. Manhattan Murder Mystery revisited this partnership, creating a dynamic

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that was built on the enduring myth of musedom, helping to sustain the film and Allen’s reputation through Keaton’s support. Increasingly, Allen’s work is tarnished by his relationships with his children and partners, prompting re-readings of his films, assisted by the degree to which fact and fiction appear to be interwoven in the narrative template of his most celebrated works. A particular focus of the criticism is Allen’s persistence in replicating the older man/younger woman relationship, repeatedly going back to iterations of the Pygmalion narrative that was the core of Annie Hall. His attitude to his female leads has also been the source of disquiet, his recent memoir having been condemned as ‘tone deaf’ in making comments on their sexual allure, implying an important qualification for the status of muse (Garner 2020). Manhattan Murder Mystery has a different dynamic, with Allen accommodating Keaton’s strengths as an actor by switching the leading roles. Whereas Allen is diminished through his personal woes, the middle-aged Keaton has grown beyond the confines of muse, with the director being forced to rewrite the film accordingly. Whereas Allen was trapped as an auteur within a relentless cycle of churning out films that reiterated the same concerns, character types, urban landscapes and existential gloom, Keaton had evidently moved on from her status of Allen’s muse. The range of roles and the enduring nature of her film career had released her, helping her to bring a freshness and energy to her performance as Carol. The muse is no longer the diffident, gamine Annie Hall, poster girl for the independent young urban woman of the late 1970s, but an independent, resolutely unattached and successful Diane Keaton, poster woman for the 1980s career woman in roles such as Baby Boom. Kent Jones praised the film as one of Allen’s greatest, believing that ‘the return of Diane Keaton liberates him and his camera’ (1998: 6). Prose observes that ‘[e]ach era endows the muse with the qualities, virtues and flaws that the epoch and its artists need and deserve’ (2003 7). The roles of muse and artist were no longer of relevance except as a marketing device with Manhattan Murder Mystery, as Allen is forced to accommodate Keaton’s star persona. By taking the role, she saves the film – and Allen’s career.

Bibliography Arton, Joseph. (2010). Woody Allen: Jewishness, femininities and stardom. PhD. University of East Anglia. Björkman, Stig. (1993). Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Bjorkman. New York: Grove Press.

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Carroll, Tim. (1993). Woody and His Women. London: Little Brown. Deleyto, Celestino. (1998). Love and other triangles: Alice and the conventions of the romantic comedy. In P.W. Evans and C. Deleyto (Eds.), Terms of Endearment: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1980s and 1990s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fuller, Graham. (2007). Breaking Away: Diane Keaton Unbound. Film Comment, Vol. 43, No. 2 (March/April), 32–36. Garner, Dwight. (2020). Woody Allen’s New Memoir Is Sometimes Funny — and Tone Deaf and Banal. The New York Times, 26 March. Available at: https://www. nytimes.com/2020/03/26/books/review-apropos-of-nothing-memoir-woodyallen.html [Accessed 17 January 2021] Gleiberman, Owen. (1993). Manhattan Murder Mystery. Entertainment Weekly, 20 August. Available at: https://ew.com/article/1993/08/20/manhattan-murdermystery-2/. [Accessed 11 November 2020] Harrison, Rebecca. (2018). Fuck the canon (or, how do you solve a problem like Von Trier). Mai: Feminism and Visual Culture, 9 November. Available at: https:// maifeminism.com/fuck-the-canon-or-how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-vontrier-teaching-screening-and-writing-about-cinema-in-the-age-of-metoo/ [Accessed 20 January 2021] Jermyn, Deborah. (2012). ‘Glorious, glamorous and that old standby, amorous’: The late blossoming of Diane Keaton’s romantic comedy career. Celebrity Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, March 2012, 37–51. Jones, Kent. (1998). Into the woods. Film Comment, Vol. 34, No. 3 (May–June), 4–6. Keaton, Diane. (2014). Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. New York: Random House. —. (2011). Then Again. London: Fourth Estate. Klemesrud, Judy. (1977). Diane Keaton: from Mr Allen to Mr Goodbar. The New York Times, 17 April. Knight, Christopher J. (2004). Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: Galatea’s Triumph Over Pygmalion. Literature/Film Quarterly 32, no. 3: 213–21. Lax, Eric. (1991). Woody Allen:Aa Biography. New York: Vintage. Little Gold Men. (2016). Vanity Fair. [podcast] 4 August. Available at: https://www. vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/cafe-society-suicide-squad-little-gold-men [Accessed 9 November 2020] Maslin, Janet. (1993). Review/Film: Manhattan Murder Mystery; Allen and Keaton, Together Again And Dizzy as Ever. The New York Times, 18 August, Section C, p. 13. Miller, Julie. (2014). Emma Stone Has an Interesting Theory About Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. Vanity Fair, 17 September. Available at: https://www.vanityfair. com/hollywood/2014/09/emma-stone-woody-allen-diane-keaton [Accessed 20 January 2021]

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Miller, Mike. (2017). Kate Winslet thinks Woody Allen is a woman ‘on some level’. Entertainment Weekly, 7 December. Available at: https://ew.com/movies/2017/12/07/ kate-winslet-woody-allen-woman-on-some-level/ [Accessed 12 November 2020] Mitchell, Deborah C. (2001). Diane Keaton: Artist and Icon. Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland. Prose, Francine. (2003). The Lives of the Muses. London: Union Books. Quart, Leonard. (1993). Film review. Cinéaste, Vol. 20, No. 2, 64. Radner, Hilary. (2010). Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture. Abingdon: Routledge. Rich, Frank. (1993). Endpaper: Public stages. The New York Times, 5 September, Section 6, p. 42. Roe, Sue. (2010). Gwen John. London: Random House. Shone, Tom. (2015). Woody Allen and the Influence of Women in His Work. The Guardian, 3 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/ sep/03/woody-allen-inner-woman-irrational-man [Accessed 17 January 2021] Simon, Jeff. (1995). A sampling of big-screen delicacies. Buffalo News, 12 September. Smith, Dinitia. (1996). How creative artists court the muse. The New York Times, 30 June. Section 2, p. 1. Travers, Peter. (1993). Manhattan Murder Mystery. Rolling Stone, 18 August 1993. Available at: https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/manhattanmurder-mystery-117987/ [Accessed 12 November 2020] You Tube. (2014). Diane Keaton in black boots – 29-Apr. [online] Available at: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucvfOu58BbY&t=307s [Accessed 9 November 2020]

Filmography A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Directed by Woody Allen. USA. Orion Pictures. 1982 Annie Hall. Directed by Woody Allen. USA. United Artists. 1977 Another Woman. Directed by Woody Allen. USA. Orion Pictures. 1988 Baby Boom. Directed by Charles Shyer. USA. United Artists. 1987 Bringing Up Baby. Directed by Howard Hawks. USA. RKO Radio Pictures. 1938 Father of the Bride. Directed by Charles Shyer. USA. Touchstone Pictures. 1991 The Godfather. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA. Paramount Pictures/Alfran Productions. 1972 The Godfather Part Two. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA. Paramount Pictures/The Coppola Company. 1974 His Girl Friday. Directed by Howard Hawks. USA. Columbia. 1940 Husbands and Wives. Directed by Woody Allen. USA. TriStar Pictures. 1992 Interiors. Directed by Woody Allen. USA. United Artists. 1978

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Looking For Mr Goodbar. Directed by Richard Brooks. USA. Paramount Pictures. 1977 Love and Death. Directed by Woody Allen. USA. United Artists. 1975 Manhattan. Directed by Woody Allen. USA. United Artists. 1979 Manhattan Murder Mystery. Directed by Woody Allen. USA. TriStar Pictures. 1993 Play It Again, Sam. Directed by Herbert Ross. USA. APJAC Productions. 1972 Radio Days. Directed by Woody Allen. USA. Orion Pictures. 1987 Reds. Directed by Warren Beatty. USA. Paramount Pictures. 1981 Sleeper. Directed by Woody Allen. USA. United Artists. 1973 Something’s Gotta Give. Directed by Nancy Meyers. USA. Columbia/Warner Bros./ Waverly Films. 2003 Wonder Wheel. Directed by Woody Allen. USA. Gravier Productions/Perdito Productions. 2017

About the Author Claire Mortimer completed her PhD at the University of East Anglia, researching ageing women in British film comedy of the twentieth century. She has published widely on subjects including ageing female stardom (e.g. Margaret Rutherford and Peggy Mount), romantic comedy and Alexander Mackendrick.

Index #MeToo 6, 9, 10, 13, 70, 114, 240 160, 268, 182, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 213, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 243, 244 A Rainy Day in New York 9, 187, 195, 199, 201, 219, 223 A Streetcar Named Desire 19, 20, 31, 32, 138 Abuse 2, 7, 12, 34, 75, 76, 100, 140, 149, 158, 161, 168, 170, 199, 201, 201, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 217, 219, 220, 222, 243, 244 Academy Award 10, 239, 250, 251, 252, 253, Adolescent, The 107, 108, 115 Adult Entertainment 235, 238, 242 Allen v. Farrow 34, 49, 207, 208, 210, 211, 216, 217, 223 Annie Hall 6, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 36, 39, 51, 87, 132, 139, 140, 151, 161, 167, 177, 183, 205, 214, 215, 217, 221, 223, 229, 230, 232, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260 Another Woman 28, 31, 32, 37, 40, 48, 51, 55, 58, 64, 66, 72, 77, 171, 237, 255, 260 Anxiety 19, 21, 23, 24, 139, 141, 153, 158, 160, 197, 198, 200, 254 Apropos of Nothing 49, 136, 143, 159, 206, 214, 219 Baby Boom 252, 253, 258, 260 Bailey, Peter 171, 175, 214 Bananas 139, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 161, 205, 217, 223 Bardem, Javier 64, 85 Baudrillard, Jean 218, 219 Beatty, Warren 231, 250, 252, 261 Bernard Shaw, George 39, 130 Big Sleep, The 122, 127, 137 Biloxi Blues 231, 242 Biography 17, 34, 50, 114, 123, 136, 140, 171, 182, 205, 215, 238, 239, 248, 249, 259 Birdcage, The 231, 242 Björkman, Stig 45, 46, 48, 49, 74, 75, 77, 129, 131, 136, 169, 182, 240, 249, 255, 258 Blanche DuBois 19, 20 Blanchett, Cate 9, 19, 20, 27 Blue Jasmine 5, 11, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 48, 49, 51 Bogart, Humphrey 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 146, 148 Born Yesterday 119, 120, 129, 130, 135, 137 Brickman, Marshall 226, 227, 228, 229, 250, 253, 254 Broadway Danny Rose 33, 35, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51

Café Society 186, 187, 188, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202 Caine, Michael 60, 231 Casablanca 122, 123, 125, 137 Celebrity 169, 183, 223 Central Park West 151, 237, 238 Cinema 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 18, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 39, 45, 46, 50, 51, 55, 60, 73, 76, 79, 80 81, 83, 84, 87, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 111, 114, 115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133, 137, 138, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 175, 176, 178, 179, 182, 183, 184, 186, 196, 201, 214, 218, 220, 221, 222, 226, 240, 242, 244, 253, 254, 259, 260 Class 56, 75, 87, 109, 110, 111, 112, 143, 151, 154, 170, 181, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201, 212, 233, 235, Clueless 84, 96 Coen, Ethan 154, 159, 225, 226, 235, Creditors 73, 77 Crime and Punishment 112, 113, 114, 115 Crimes and Misdemeanors 10, 35, 64, 77, 101, 108, 113, 115, 116, 231, 241 Crisis in Six Scenes 153, 154, 156, 157, 160, 161, 226, 227, 230, 234, 235, 239, 241, 242 Cruz, Penelope 88, 187, 248 Cukor, George 119, 120, 121, 126, 129, 137, 138 Curse of the Jade Scorpion 119, 126, 127, 128, 136, 137 de Beauvoir, Simone 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, Death Defying Acts 225, 226, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241 Deconstructing Harry 29, 31, 115, 141, 162, 169, 183, 186, 187, 196, 198, 200, 202 Dederer, Claire 10, 13, 100, 112, 115, 140, 141, 158, 159, 167, 168, 171, 182 Deleuze, Gilles 172, 182 Deleyto, Celestino 84, 85, 96, 255, 259 Dietrich, Marlene 132, 180 Don’t Drink the Water 146, 162, 241 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 31, 101, 106, 107, 108, 110, 112, 114, 115 Double Indemnity 125, 126, 127, 137 Drug use 23, 64, 68, 106, 107, 125, 199 Dumas, Alexandre 106, 111, 115 Ebert, Roger 171, 172, 174, 182, 210, 220 Echart, Pablo 43, 49 Elle 20, 148 Engels, Friedrich 56, 75 Eternal Feminine 5, 12, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 67, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76

264 Index Fading Gigolo 186, 202, 215, 223 Farrow, Dylan 7, 100, 140, 148, 160, 167, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 217, 222, 246 Farrow, Mia 9, 34, 47, 67, 72, 100, 128, 144, 171, 207, 208, 212, 214, 215, 216, 239, 244, 248, 253 Faust 56, 57, 73, 75 Fellini, Federico 119, 120, 121, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 138, 170, 183, 215 Film Noir 121, 124, 126, 127 Fisher, Carrie 65, 225 French 20, 21, 24, 28, 30, 31, 32, 75, 102, 111, 159, 212, 220, 226, Freud, Sigmund 61, 91, 144, 150, 152, 153, 158, 160, 161, 207, 216 George is Dead 225, 226, 236 Gershwin, George 36, 64, 102 Godfather, The 215, 224, 251, 253, 260 Gornick, Vivian 139, 140, 150, 160 Grinberg, Marat 101, 115, 159, 200, 201, 220, 221, 232 Hannah and Her Sisters 9, 10, 11, 12, 35, 39, 48, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 142, 149, 162, 214, 215, 216, 223, 225, 231, 240 Hartman, Mary 152, 162 Heartbreak Kid, The 231, 232, 242 Hemingway, Mariel 9, 35, 100, 146, 210, 218, 222 Henson, Jim 231, 242 Hirsch, Foster 36, 45, 46, 49, 50 Hollywood 9, 11, 12, 46, 50, 65, 72, 83, 96, 101, 109, 115, 125, 128, 131, 136, 146, 148, 157, 160, 170, 175, 176, 177, 183, 218, 220, 222, 240, 243, 244, 246, 257, 259 Honeymoon Motel 149, 154, 159, 226, 235, 236, 237 Hope, Bob 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 130 Hotline 237, 238 Husbands and Wives 28, 32, 48, 64, 77, 211, 212, 217, 221, 222, 223, 260 Il trovatore 105, 106, 108, 116 Interiors 9, 26, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 51, 148, 162, 215, 223, 249, 251, 160 Intertextuality 11, 55, 76, 116, 119, 139, 141, 145, 146, 153, 158, 214, 230 Ishtar 157, 161, 162, 228, 242 Jewishnes 12, 37, 47, 71, 76, 115, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 196, 198, 202, 214, 215, 219, 220, 221, 222, 231, 232, 233, 235, 257, 241, 259, Johansson, Scarlett 9, 12, 64, 81, 93, 106, 139, 141, 146, 147, 148, 150, 159, 160, 209, 248

Kael, Pauline 39, 50, 142, 156, 210, 221 Kafka, Franz 130, 234, Kant, Immanuel 102, 103, 115, Kavner, Julie 12, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 151, 160, Kazan, Elia 20, 23, 32, 238 Keaton, Diane 6, 9, 13, 35, 65, 121, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 135, 171, 209, 214, 215, 232, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261 Kierkegaard, Søren 27, 151 La Strada 120, 131, 132, 135, 138, 170, 171, 183 La Traviata 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 116 Labyrinth 231, 142 Landau, Martin 20, 64, 108 Lasser, Louise 139, 141, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 159, 160, 171, 214, 248, 251 Lax, Eric 45, 46, 47, 50, 99, 114, 115, 130, 136, 216, 222, 254, 259 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 35, 41, 42, 44, 48, 49, 50 Looking for Mr Goodbar 252, 253, 261 Lost in Translation 146, 162 Love and Death 113, 116, 137, 223, 249, 257, 261 Macbeth 106, 116 Mamet, David 154, 225, 226, 237 Manhattan Murder Mystery 6, 119, 121, 124, 125, 137, 229, 231, 243, 244, 245, 252, 253, 254, 255, 2567, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261 Manhattan 5, 10, 11, 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 64, 65, 77, 100, 102, 116, 140, 146, 153, 162, 167, 168, 183, 205, 210, 215, 218, 220, 223, 229, 230, 232, 242, 249, 253, 261 Masculinity 11, 12, 17, 19, 26, 40, 43, 44, 66, 72, 89, 99, 121, 122, 124, 126, 132, 146, 148, 149, 150, 181, 215, 245 Match Point 12, 55, 64, 77, 99, 101, 102, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 146, 162, 223, 241 May, Elaine 13, 139, 141, 153, 154, 156, 159, 161, 162, 225, 226, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242 Midnight in Paris 27, 29, 32, 123, 136, 137 Mighty Aphrodite 185, 186, 187, 189, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 209, 224, 238, 239, 242 Miss Julie 57, 73 Morse, Susan E. 10, 103 Morton, Samantha 12, 131, 133, 135 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183 Motorcycle Diaries, The 109, 116 Mulvey, Laura 39, 50, 70, 76 My Favorite Blonde 119, 137 Mystic Pizza 84, 96

265

Index

New York City 18, 19, 24, 26, 36, 44, 46, 119, 143, 144, 1445, 146, 151, 152, 153, 187, 198, 205, 206, 208 Nichols and May 155, 156, 160, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230 Nichols, Mike 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 242 Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 27, 55, 57, 58, 61, 64, 76, 108, 213 Oedipus Wrecks 143, 144, 145, 147, 150, 153, 155 Othello 70, 106, 111, 112, 116 Otto Preminger 232, 242 Paris Review 10, 13, 100, 115, 140, 159, 167 Paris 108, 207, 213 Philaretou, Andreas 40, 50 Play It Again, Sam 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 136, 137, 148, 162, 214, 224, 231, 242, 248, 249, 261 Postfeminist 80, 84, 89, 90, 96 Pretty Woman 188, 193, 194, 200, 201 Previn, Soon-Yi 10, 34, 100, 109, 112, 140143, 167, 171, 173, 208, 217, 222, 239, 244, 248 Prostitution 6, 12, 113, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202 Pygmalion 39, 40, 130, 194, 238, 239, 250, 252, 258, 259 Radio Days 10, 128, 134, 138, 142, 143, 157, 162, 170, 183, 249, 261 Relatively Speaking 159, 225, 226, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240, 242 Rhoda 142, 162 Rifkin’s Festival 49, 51 Rigoletto 105, 106, 108, 110, 116 Rodowick, David 39, 50 Romanticism 101, 102, 103, 113, 114 Rosemary’s Baby 125, 138 Ross, Herbert 121, 122, 162, 224, 231, 242, 261 San Francisco 18, 19, 24, 26, 223 Sarris, Andrew 33, 34, 168, 183 Schlemiel 150, 213, 214, 220, 241 Schopenhauer, Arthur 27, 103, 115 Scoop 146, 147, 150, 162 Scorsese, Martin 101, 162 Second Sex, The 20, 30, 55, 56, 75 September 28, 31, 32, 48, 51, Shadows and Fog 162, 185, 186, 188, 190, 194, 195, 199, 200, 202 Shiksa 139, 151 Showalter, Elaine 91, 92, 96, 150, 152, 161, 216, 223

Simpsons, The 142, 145, 162 Sleeper 139, 162, 205, 224, 229, 249, 253, 257, 261 Small Time Crooks 119, 120, 121, 129, 130, 131, 135, 138, 154, 162, 226, 227, 230, 233, 234, 238, 239, 242 Stardust Memories 45, 51, 113, 131, 138, 172, 183, 210, 220, 221, 224 Stone, Emma 4, 9, 247, 248, 249, 254, 259 Streep, Meryl 9, 35 Strindberg, August 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 66, 68, 69, 73, 74, 76, 77 Such Good Friends 76, 231, 242 Sweet and Lowdown 6, 12, 50, 120, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 138, 167, 169, 170, 173, 174, 175, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 222 Take the Money and Run 151, 154, 162, 169, 183 Television 7, 23, 51, 70, 109, 125, 142, 143, 145, 148, 149, 152, 154, 160, 163, 213, 218, 222, 226, 231, 232, 241, The muse 6, 11, 13, 146, 167, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 177, 202, 203, 210, 218, 220, 225, 243, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, 250, 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258, 260 The New York Times 34, 50, 153, 159, 161, 209, 212, 220, 222, 228, 231, 235, 237, 238, 240, 241, 246, 259, 260 Theatre 8, 58, 73, 75, 154, 159, 178, 225, 235, 238 Thurman, Uma 132, 170, 174, 179, 182 To Rome With Love 102, 116, 119, 120, 131, 133, 134, 138, 186, 187, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202 Trump, Donald 100, 112, 114, 157, 169 Turturro, John 186, 202, 215, 223, 225 Ullman, Tracy 130, 137, 145, 147, 160, 162 Verdi, Giuseppe 102, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116 Vicky Cristina Barcelona 5, 12, 48, 51, 64, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 96, 97, 147, 162 Village Voice 33, 173 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 39, 50, 70, 76 Weinstein, Harvey 9, 34, 100, 140, 161, 168, 169, 209, 220, 222, 244 White Sheik, The 119, 120, 131, 133, 134, 138 Willis, Gordon 45, 46, 168, 218 Yiddish 144, 145, 147, 154, 155, 213 Zelig 45, 51, 170, 183