Free The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen by Peter J. Bailey Page B

sanctity of marriage and the significance of the family.” “Woody Allen and the Jews,” Midstream, December, 1992, p. 23, rpt in Perspectives on Woody Allen, p. 197.
    6. The majority of the 1990s Allen films which depict the Allen protagonist as being in some sense attenuated or withdrawn from life end in rebirths: Larry (Murder Mystery) and Lenny (Mighty Aphrodite) spark regenerations of their marriages, and David Shayne (Bullets) rejects the theater in favor of marriage and family. The darkest of the decade’s films, Husbands and Wives, and the sunniest, Everyone Says I Love You, leave the Allen protagonist unattached and dismal, as do Celebrity and Sweet and Lowdown .
    7. David Ansen noted the influence of Wild Strawberries on Deconstructing Harry in his review of Christmas 1997 releases. “Season of the Grinch” (review of Deconstructing Harry), Newsweek, December 22, 1997, p. 85.
    8. Harry’s two enthusiasms converge in a conversation he has with Cookie Williams, an African-American prostitute. “You know what a black hole is?” he asks her; “Yeah,” she replies, “that’s how I make my living.”
    9. Borg’s revisitings of his past in Bergman’s film precisely anticipate Allen’s favorite mode of flashback: in the work of both filmmakers, the character remembering the event is physically present in it, sometimes—as in Borg’s meeting with his fiancée, Sara, or Judah’s appearance at his father’s seder in Crimes and Misdemeanors —being able to converse with those occupying the memory.
    10. The script’s consciousness of its own art/life duplicities is signaled not only through the blurring of Harry’s stories and his experiences, but also in his assurance to Fay that “You fell in love with my work—that’s a different thing … But this is not a book. We’re not characters in a fictional thing.”
    11. The prospect of “growing up” is particularly threatening to Harry because doing so probably means sacrificing what he values most in the world: his attractiveness to women. “Because of my immaturity,” he tells a friend, “I have a boyish quality which works for me [with women].”
    12. The incessant “whining” of Allen’s protagonists which Woodyphobes often cite as a primary objection to his movies is precisely this kind of unrelenting narcissistic self-affirmation: it’s the individual self’s unyielding, insistent demand that exterior reality respond to its endless demands of “I want,” and constitutes his strongest link to the Jewish American literary tradition. Compare the declaration of Stanley Elkin’s Push the Bully: “I didn’t make myself. I probably can’t save myself, but maybe that’s the only need I don’t have. I taste my lack and that’s how I win—by having nothing to lose. It’s not good enough. I want and I want and I will die wanting. …” “A Poetics for Bullies” in Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 216.
    13. Harrys elevator journey into Hell is, like the plot of Manhattan Murder Mystery, a vestige of the original Allen/Brickman Annie Hall script, including a reprise of the department store-like annunciation of its circles as he descends. Annie Hall script: “layer five: organized crime, fascist dictators, and people who don’t appreciate oral sex” (Rosenblum and Karen, p. 280); Deconstructing Harry: “Floor six: right wing extremists, serial killers, lawyers who appear on television.”
    14. Frank Gado finds the same Oedipal tension underlying Wild Strawberries, quoting Bergman’s acknowledgment of his hatred for his father. “Only after overcoming [that hatred],” Bergman argued, “could I, without forcing myself to, talk with him and see that he was a poor old man whom I could take pity on and feel sympathy for.” Gado, The Passion of Ingmar Bergman, p. 224.
    15. “Anhedonia” may have been scrapped as the title of Annie Hall, but the condition is seldom absent from the psychological