ENDPAPER
Why we need Woody Allen
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
Middlebrow sensibility: The secret of his appeal.
WOODY ALLEN at 70 has a new film out — "Match Point". More so than his other films, "Match Point" has the weight, shape and sensibility of a book more than a movie. Its theme is the oldest in literature: character versus fate. Asked recently by The Guardian Weekly if he worries whether he might, one day, stop being funny, he said, "Well, no. Because if I wakeup, I'm going to be funny, because it's me. It's not that I put on a thing to do it: I wake up in the morning and I can write. I roll out of bed and I can write; I can write — that what I do, that's me." The literary Allen is something we forget, and yet we shouldn't — his films are suffused with literature. His movie characters — whether architects, actors, artists, stockbrokers or housewives — are primarily readers.
Strongly literary
Though a sophisticated film stylist, Allen's stories and characters remain strongly literary. The dialogues are full of references to books — quotes from philosophers, lines from poems and plays, names of literary characters, and actual cameo appearances by contemporary writers.
To many fans of Woody Allen, it is a series of three slim volumes of essays by the writer-filmmaker that they hold dearer than even his films: Getting Even (1971), Without Feathers (1975), and Side Effects (1980), which have now been collected in one neat volume called The Complete Prose of Woody Allen. Some critics now see Allen as a middlebrow sensibility masquerading as highbrow. But that's exactly why we like Allen, that's why we relate to him more than any other intellectual comic. This middlebrow sensibility is the strongest connection we have with him. It's baffling why critics valorise the lowbrow and the highbrow while mocking the middlebrow.
Many of us intellectual, sensitive, arty types are middlebrow in our tastes and middlebrow in our sensibility. Like Allen, we too regard high culture with awe. If we can't drink deeply from it, we want to at least partake of it, want it to rub off on us.
But often the closest we come to it is a peek at it: surrounding ourselves with Penguin classics we've never read and will probably never get to read — at least not all of them. What we possess is a smattering, a sampling of culture: we seem to know what Kafkaesque means without having read too much of Kafka, and we catch up with the great classics via movie versions of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. This, of course, is a caricature of the cultural aspirations of a middlebrow but that's what Woody Allen is all about. Allen won't be funny if this tension between the middlebrow and highbrow didn't exist.
How does this actually work? The formula of Allen's humour is the tension between what highbrow culture demands and what middlebrow experience offers. Allen's three best essays from The Complete Prose of Woody Allen — "The Whore of Mensa", "Mr. Big" and "The Kugelmas Episode" — are probably the best middlebrow fantasies of the highbrow ever concocted. When Woody Allen wrote those three masterful parodies of the middlebrow life he was fantasising for all of us. In "Mr. Big", a cute philosophy major hires a detective to find God so she can write her thesis paper.
Masterpiece
"The Whore of Mensa", which I think is Allen's masterpiece, is about a high-class brothel that has women cater to your intellectual needs. For a price they'll come over and discuss any subject: Proust, Yeats, anthropology. Or you could go over to the joint, which operates behind a famous New York bookstore, run by a Madam with a master's degree in Comparative Literature. Once inside the joint, you see girls with black-rimmed glasses lolling around the sofas, rifling Penguin classics provocatively. For a hundred bucks a girl would discuss the symbolism in Melville's books. If you want to get kinky, for two hundred bucks you could get a blonde and a brunette to explain Noam Chomsky to you. For more money, a thin Jewish girl will let you read her Master's thesis and fake a suicide of your choosing.
In "The Kugelmas Episode", a bookish Jewish professor of literature finds a magician who can actually send him, body and soul, into any fictional work of his choice. The academic ends up sleeping with Emma Bovary. "My God, I'm with Madame Bovary!" Kugelmas whispers to himself. "Me, who failed freshman English." What he doesn't realise is that at that very moment students in various classrooms across the world were saying to their teachers: "Who is this character on page 100? A bald Jew is kissing Madame Bovary?" He brings her back to New York and they go shopping. "I cannot get my mind around this," says a professor at Stanford, "first a strange character named Kugelmas, and now she's gone from the book. Well, I guess the mark of a classic is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something new."
Playing the victim
The comic absurdity of existence, the middlebrow's humiliation of being constantly mocked by everyday reality in his or her quest for a meaningful life — we've all been victims of this. In struggling with these themes in his work, by showing us irony where we couldn't see it, Allen has put himself on the line for us. He has been personal, autobiographical, indulgent, yes — but he has also been brave, honest, transparent. By playing the victim for us, he has taken on one of the oldest roles the artist played in history — that of the scapegoat. His suffering illuminates our lives. That's why we need Woody Allen around. He is us — only, Penguin classics be praised, so much funnier.
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