THE M A N

BEHIND
WODDY ALLEN
BY LENNARD DAVIS

AN YOU THINK of a Contemporary major filmmaker

who is devoted to the great books? In this age
of blood and sex in Hollywood productions,
whimsical independent films about dysfunctional families,
coming-of-age movies, or cartoons of happy animals saving
the polar ice caps, it is difficult to select serious intellectuals
from the central casting roster of glib, lowbrow directors.
We might get the occasional Shakespearean like Kenneth
Branagh, the Shakespeare wannabe like Mel Gibson or
Ethan Hawke, and the rare devoted crew of Merchant Ivory.
There's the oddity of great books adaptations such as Robert
Zemeckiss Beowulf {2007)with Angelina Jolie striking a
pose as a sex-goddess version of Grendel's mother. (Didn't
we always think Mama Grendel was old and ugly?). But to
find a director consistently interested in the great books and
the Western philosophical traditionand willing to make
them the very stuff of his moviestakes some searching.
22

THE COMMON REVIEW voi. 7. NO. i

So it might strike one as strange

to think ofthat search ending at
the East Side condominium of Allan Knigsbergor, as you might
know him, Woody Allen. Can we
really think seriously about the bespectacled, neurotic schlemiel who
stumbles through Take the Money
and Run (1969) or Bananas (1971) as
the true hetr to the Western intellectual tradition? A new book by Eric
Laxof conversations spanning
30 years with Woody Allendoes
precisely that. In Conversations with
Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies,
and Moviemaking, we are presented
with the Allen that most of us don't
know. I'd like, for the purposes of
this review, to refer to that unknown
person as Allan Stewart Knigsberg,
since, as he tells us, "Woody Allen"
was a name he chose in high school
when starting out as a joke writer
for New York gossip columnsand
it seems to be one that was never
legally adopted. The name and the
nerdy personality that accompanied
it have morphed into the character
of Woody Allen. But it would be a
mistake to substitute the hapless,
stuttering jokester for the prolific
and award-winning filmmaker who
has made more than one film a year
for the past 30 years. We mustn't
confuse art with life, of course, but
it's hard when we have such a bounty of art that seems largely retlective
of its creator.

etaching Woody Allen from

Allan Knigsberg reveals a
strange and interesting mind, a
mind worth considering. Certainly
one could object that there is a
major obtuseness in any effort to
take a comedian seriously. (Look at
those French intellectuals writing
about Jerry Lewis. How ridiculel)
But let us for a moment grant that
Knigsberg is indeed worth taking
seriously. After all, why wouldn't
24

THE COMMON REVIEW VOL, 7. NO, l

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY:

Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the Movies,
and Moviemaking, by Eric Lax, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007

Complete Prose, by Woody Allen, Wings Books, 1991.

Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy s Wrong?,
edited by Mark T. Conard and Aeon J. Skoble, Open Court, 2004
Woody Allen: Interviews, edited by Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie
Coblentz, University of Mississippi Press, 2006

we want to consider the thoughts

of a filmmaker this productive, and
whose films have, over the decades,
garnered international awards?
More than almost any other filmmaker in the United States, Knigsberg is an auteur, since tew if any
have been given such free rein as he
has. Even the most famous American directors will tell you that artistic freedom is a rare if not unknown
thing. But Knigsberg has been allowed complete directorial freedom
in his filmsand for that reason
alone his career is worth considering
as a lifelong artistic statement. The
fact that he's good at one-liners and
sight gags shouldn't obviate the accomplishment.
In interviews with Eric Lax, a
longtime friend of the director, we
find a Knigsberg who is obsessed
with his role as an artist and intellectual in society. Not only is he
conversant in modern art, but he
has read the ancient Greeks, the
Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophers, and the great
novelists and poets of the Western
world. And his films are packed
with references to this aristocracy
of ideas. A recent viewing o(Manhattan {1979) yielded references
to Ingmar Bergman, Kierkegaard,

Gustav Mahler, Leo Tolstoy, August

Strindberg, Jean-Pierre Rampai,
Franz Kaika, Antonio Vivaldi, and
Norman Mailerand that's a sampling from only one film. Any other
filmmaker would be considered
pompous or "intellectual" to pack a
single movie with such references,
but because Woody Allen is the
character, Knigsberg can get away
with it.
Konigsberg'.s philosophical interests range from Plato to the German
philosophers, but to him Bertrand
Russell "makes much more sense,
resonates much more deeply with me." Camus, Sartre and Nietzsche
"are more dramatic and concerned
with iife-and-death subjects." His
reading of the critic George Steiners
study Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism provoked
him, he says, to reread The Idiot.
Other critical writers and philosophers he reads include Isaiah Berlin
and William Barrett, who wrote
Irrational Man. He notes, "If 1 had
my education to do over, I would
probably go to college and probably
be a philosophy major [as was his
first wife Harlene Rosenl" But Knigsberg is a philosopher, at least to
the assembled academics in Woody
Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My

Whole Fallacy Is Wrong? Essays on

the meaning of life, morality, and
interpretation sift through the filmic
opus and present Knigsberg variously as a "pragmatic optimist", a
nihilistic pessimist, and a Kantian.

nigsberg makes it clear that he

started reading to help him with
the girls he was going out with, girls
who tended to regard him as an uneducated lout. "It was the very end
of high school when I started going
out with women who found me illiterate," he reminisces. "I thought
those girls were so beautiful....
One would say 'Did you read this
Faulkner novel?* And I'd say, 'I read
comic books. I've never read a book
in my life.' I don't know anything
like that. And so in order to keep
pace, 1 had to read. Hemingway and
Faulkner."
7b be sure, the decade was the
1950s, and at least in the art-house,
coffee shop scene an equation was
being forged that converted knowledge of philosophy and art into
something sexy and hip. But Knigsberg clearly took to such reading like a philosopher to dialectics.
While he's honest about his motivation, we might want to consider the
role of erotics in reading in general
and philosophy in particular. Philosophy, after all, does mean the love of
wisdom. Socrates, in the Symposium,
started up the connection between
flirting and philosophical thought,
and it would probably be revealing
to see how many of the great philosophers connected those same dots.
Contemporary philosophers such as
Jacques Derrida and critics such as
Roland Barthes have rolled eros and
desire into philosophy and criticism
so that they are inseparable.
Knigsberg makes it clear that he
reads widely hut without depth or
directionpartly because he never
attended college or university in any

sustained way. His lack of discipline

but interest in philosophy got turned
into famous one-liners: "1 was
thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman
year for cheating on my metaphysics
fmal, you know: I looked within the
soul of the boy sitting next to me."
Actually, Knigsbergs short essay
"My Philosophy" in his Complete
Prose should be required reading in
any philosophy course. It's a hilarious Cooks Tour through the history
of thought, with segments like his
"Critique of Pure Dread," in which
he writes:
In formulating any philosophy, the
first consideration must always be:
What can we know? That is, what can
we be sure we know, or sure that we
know we knew it, if indeed it is at all
knowable. Or have we simply forgotten it and are too embarrassed to say
anything? Descartes hinted at the
problem when he wrote, "My mind
can never know my body, although
it has become quite friendly with my
legs."
As funny as this may be, the last
sentence summarizes the mindbody dichotomy very nicely.
But is humor a form of knowledge? Norman Cousins has written
that laughter and humor can help to
cope with, and even to combat, disease. For Freud, humor was a form
of sublimated hostility or libidinous
energy made palatable through narrative transformation. (Knigsberg
even includes the Freudian reading
of humor as aggression in his 1980
film, Stardust Memories, when a
professor of film at Columbia asks
Allen about his unconscious aggression and homosexuality.) Jokes can
be a distilled form of wisdom and
certainly one of the only remnants
of oral culture in mainstream society, although most people are more
likely to get their jokes from the
Internet now than from a traveling
salesman or a waggish uncle. Knigsberg sees a connection between

writing jokes and poetry. In talking

about his admiration for W. B. Yeats,
he notes,
I think that had I been better
educated, I could write poetry,
because a writer of comedy has
some ofthat equipment to begin
with. You're dealing with nuance
and ear and meter, and one syllable olTin something I write
in a gag ruins the laugh.... In
actual one-liners, there's something succinct, you do something
that you do in poetry. In a very
compressed way you express a
thought or feeling and it's depen*
dent on the balancing of words.
Knigsberg points to his famous
joke: "I'm not afraid of dying. I just
don't want to be there when it happens." He notes how this joke expresses something in a compressed
way and that "if you use one word
more or less it's not as good."

onigsberg's reference to being

undereducated might lead us
to consider him as what the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio
Gramsci called an "organic intellectual." Unlike a university-trained
thinker, the organic intellectual rises
up naturally from his social class
and is, by defmition, an autodidact.
Knigsberg, coming from a lowermiddle-class family in Brooklyn,
certainly fits into Gramsci's category
for this type.
However, unlike the organic
intellectual of Gramsci's thinking,
Knigsberg does little to develop the
contradictions of his rise in status,
He's no advocate of class struggle.
Rather, Knigsberg grew up admiring the life of the rich that he saw in
films. "1 imagined people in these
Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue
houses," he reminisces, "involved
in their lives, with their butlers and
their valets and their breakfast in
bed, dressing for dinner and going
to nightclubs and coming back late
THE COMMON REVIEW voi.7, NO. i

25

at night. Supper clubs, cocktails, piano bars. That world for some reason
. . . clicked in for me."
It's perhaps here that Knigsberg
made a significant deviation that
would have consequences for his
art. His admiration of the lifestyles
of the rich and famous turned his
writerly and critical gaze away from
social questions. Rather than an
engaged social critic, he became a
disengaged social climber, and in so
doing, he ruled out the possibility
that his films would be like those of
Vittorio De Sica or other neorealists
such as Ermanne Olmi who incorporate a class analysis in their work.
Konigsberg's character Woody
Allen is one who does not move
seamlessly through life, but does
move seamlessly through the cashand-carry world of New York's intellectual and artistic classes. In such
films as Manhattan, Hannah and
Her Sisters (1986), and Husbands
and Wives (1992), Allen fits into this
world. More recently, in Match Point
(2005), the character played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is a social climber
who even kills to secure his position
in a wealthy family, and Knigsberg
allows him to succeed in the midst
of moral depravity.
But the racial component in the
world of Konigsberg's films is never
entirely absent. Race never shows
up in regard to people of color, but
rather in the perpetual discussion
of what it means and how it feels
to be a lew. (Indeed, Knigsberg
has been criticized for never having black characters of any note, or
when there is a note, it is a broadly
and questionably satiric one, struck
for instance with the black prostitute in his 1997 film Deconstructing
Harry.) The Jewish question is exposed, but in a comic mode. While
Allen is preceded by many other
lewish comic personas, few if any of
them made jokes about being Jewish
26

THE COMMON REVIEW voi,.7, NO. i

when on the national screen. Rather,

people like Jerry Lewis (n Jerome
Levitch), Milton Berle (Milton Berlinger), or Jack Benny (Benjamin
Kubelsky) and a comic synagogue
of others (including those who don't
"look" lewish, such as Ed Wynn and
the Three Stooges) filled American

Knigsberg states
that his reading of
philosophy and
literature is mainly an
attempt to help him
answer the ultimate
question about life: its
purpose and values in
its relation to death.

theaters and living rooms with their

personalities, but very few played
the Jewish card. Knigsberg is one of
the first to lead with the question of
being Jewish and to use this identity
as the foundation of his comedy.
But Knigsberg doesn't go for
Jewish public issues or injustices.
He doesn't opine about Israel, for
example, and while the subjects of
the Holocaust and Nazis come up
frequently in jokes, the films and
prose of Konig.sberg mainly present the Jew as "out of place," to use
the critic Edward Said's term. In the
irony of seeing Knigsberg trying to
shoehorn himself into the elegant
WASP society depicted in the blackand-white films of the 1940s, we observe that the place chosen is always
paradoxically a space in which he is
out of place. Unlike Philip Roth or
Saul Bellow, who express discom-

fort at the prospect of trying to fit

in, Knigsberg leaps into the East
Side glamour world, recreating the
imagined community that was, after
all, created by the Jewish Hollywood
producers for the delectation of the
predominantly Christian filmgoing
audiences. Knigsberg attempts to
integrate into place through the modality of irony, comedy, and social
status.
The many scenes of obvious Jewishncss that appear in the films arc
usually that of loud, lower-class, old
Jews arguing, kvetching, and acting out. But that depiction doesn't
serve to marginalize or isolate Jews,
because of the Sartrean necessity
to have Semite and anti-Semite
bound together, Jew needs Christian; and Christian needs Jew. Thus
the hilarious scenes in Annie Hall
(1977} show Allen as the outsider
to Keaton's WASP family. Yet the
family's WASPiness is made strange
and even psychotic, most directly
in Christopher Walken's notorious
portrayal of the weird brother. The
take-home message is that Jews are
a strange subset of America, but
not the only strange subset. Charlie
Chaplin managed to set up the [ew
and Aryan dichotomy only to reduce it to a comic idea by having
Hitler change places witb a poor
Jewish barber.
Chaplin, unlike Knigsberg, uses
his dialectic to mock the notion of
Aryan superiority. For Knigsberg,
the Jew will always be the caricature
of the shtetl ycnta or the neurasthenic intellectual. In other words,
there is no resolution to Jewishness,
other than to elaborate on its endless ways; thus Jewishness becomes a
leitmotif throughout the opus rather
than a tragic dirge. This is one of
the many moments in Konigsberg's
work in which the decision to avoid
the tragic becomes itself a kind of
tragic theme.

n the interviews with Lax, Knigsberg states that his reading of

philosophy and literature is mainly
an attempt to help him answer the
ultimate question about life: its
purpose and values in its relation to
death. "I think the most important
issues to me are what one's values in
life should bethe existence of God,
deaththat's real interesting to me.
Whether it's capitalist society or socialismthat's superficial." The task
Knigsberg takes on is no small one
for a comedian, let alone a philosopher! Knigsberg puts the problem
into the voice of his character Allen
when he says, "My view of reality is
that it has always been a grim place
to be . . . but it's the only place you
can get Chinese food." Variations on
this theme appear throughout his
writings: "Not only is there no God,
but try getting a plumber on weekends." Or, "Eternal nothingness is
O.K. if you're dressed for it."
In somewhat less of a punch-line
voice he rues, "1 think the salient
feature about human existence is
man's inhumanity to man." He reiterates the point:
What I'm really sayingand it's
not hidden or esoteric, it's just
clear as a bellis that we have to
accept that the universe is godless and life is meaningless, often
a terrible and brutal experience
with no hope, and that love relationships are very, very hard, and
that we still need tofinda way to
not only cope but lead a decent
and moral life.
In this sense, he's Kierkegaardian
without the leap of faith, or Sartrean
without the existential ethics of action. But Knigsberg does ask, "How
do we carry on, or even, why should
we choose to carry on?" His answerspecifically to a Jesuit priestphilosopher at St. Johns University
who wrote an essay on Crimes and
Misdemeanors (1989), describing the
movie as the most atheistic film ever

madeis notable:
To me it's a damn shame that the
universe doesn't Kave any God or
meaning, and yet only when you
can accept that can you then go
on to lead what these people call
a Christian lifethat is, a decent,
moral life. You can only lead it it"
you acknowledge what you're up
against to begin with and shuck
off all the fairy tales that lead you
to make choices in life that you're
making not really for moral reasons but for taking down a big
score in the afterlife.
Konigsberg's reasoning here fits
in line with a kind of radical materialist view of existence combined
with an existential imperative. But
Konigsberg's vision of the universe,
unlike that of his hero Ingmar
Bergman, never rises to the tragic.
Knigsberg laments that his own
works will never have the stature of
Bergman's, but the reason isn't lack
of art so much as it is the eschewal
of the tragic. In place ofthat we get
pathos and despair. As Woody's exwite, played by Meryl Streep, wrote
in her expos of his character Isaac
Davis in Manhattan,
He was given tofitsof rage,
Jewish, liberal paranoia, male
chauvinism, self-righteous misanthropy, and nihilistic moods
of despair. He had complaints
about life, but never solutions. He
longed to be an artist, but balked
at the necessary sacrifices. In bis
most private moments, he spoke
of his fear of deatb which he elevated to tragic beights when, in
fact, it was mere narcissism.
It seems clear that Woody's exwife in the film is acting as the
superego for Knigsberg. His tragic
heights arc actually fake perspectives covering up a universe that is
merely pathetic.

ne way of out of the existential dilemma is not so much

political action as writing. Knigsberg recognizes the seriousness of

writing. He has referred to Tolstoy's

dictum that the writer has to dip his
pen in blood. The screenwriter does
dip his pen in blood, more frequently in recent films of Konigsberg's
that investigate the ethical issues
around murder. In at least three
of hisfilmsMic/iPoint, Crimes
and Misdemeanors, and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993}central
characters kill their female partners,
and in two of them they get away
with it. It's a world in which there
is no God or moral center that demands they be punished in the narrative. Knigsberg in effect stares at
a world that Dostoevsky could not
bring himself to imagine when he
said that without God there could be
no morality.
It is writing, whether funny or
serious, that is centra! to Knigsberg: "But if tomorrow I couldn't get
financing I would be very happy to
write plays, very happy to sit home
and try to write a novel and maybe
under those circumstances try to
write an autobiography or a memoir. I just like to work, to write." He
makes it clear over and over in these
interviews that he sees his main job
as that of a writer. In fact, what is
quite amazing and revealing in the
interviews is how little he does as a
director. He never rehearses his actors before shooting, and he almost
never tells them how to act. He only
shows them their "sides," or the segment of the dialogue in which they
participate, but they do not read the
script as a whole. He allows them to
use the lines he's written or to make
up their own. He also rarely talks to
his actors on the set or off. Of Judy
Davis, one of his most used actors,
he says: "She and I never had any
coriimunication at all because there
was no need for it. I would think we
haven't exchanged a hundred words
in our lifetime, and we've done three
or four pictures
I've never had to

THE COMMON REVIEW voi. r, NO. i

2J

give her any direction at all." When

he casts his actors, he does so by
reputation, and when he flies them
in for an interview, he has almost
never rejected a single one.
Why this strange detachment?
The directorial neutrality is also
combined with a disregard of one
of the crucial demands in filmmakingcoverage. Most filmmakers
shoot a master shot with the main
characters visible in the frame, and
then they shoot close-ups, reverse
shots, to get good coverage so that
when they are in the editing phase
they have many options for how to
put a scene together. Knigsberg, according to Lax, doesn't usually shoot
coverage, and mainly works with
master shots.
This method allows a huge element of chance to enter his films,
more so than with many directors.
And it isn't coincidental that chance
plays such a big role in his artistic
and philosophical vision. For example. Match Point opens with the
image of a tennis ball balancing on
the net, about to fall one way or the
other. This moment is one of pure
chance, not dependent on the skill
of either player. Yet in a match-point
moment in tennis, the entire game
depends on which way the ball falls.
And the film itself ends up with
the image of a ring that has been
tossed by the main characterthe
ring that, if found, would certainly
lead to his arrest for murder. The
tossed ring balances for a second on
a metal railing over the Thames, and
the film slows down this moment
of chanceuntil the ring doesn't
fall into the river. And even though
chance or luck seems now to be
against the murderer, the matter is
by no means settled.

any plot points in Konigsberg's films depend on people

running into each other in New
28

THE COMMON REVIEW VOLT,

York, in fact, you could say that the

only plot arrangements in Knigsberg films depend on these chance
encounters. And if Knigsberg allows chance to structure his films, in

Chance provides a
belief for the atheist
that there is no design
or will, so that when
things happen, good
orbad, they can be
assigned to chance.

both form and content, it is because

his vision of the universe is one
without pattern or design. Chance is
the atheist's answer to prayer. Prayer
depends on the idea that there is a
design or will in the universe and
this can be influenced to change
events. Chance provides a belief for
the atheist that there is no design
or will, so that when things happen,
good or bad, they can be assigned to
chance. In this sense, chance gives a
kind of agency to the individual who
doesn't believe in design or will.
Writing gives an additional sense
of control. If you can't shape events
in the world, you can at least shape
the world in narrative. By leaving
filmmaking to a kind of chance,
Knigsberg structures his world
through the writing of it. But even
the writing process is evanescentimportant but done quickly.
His work is spontaneous in all ways,
then; Knigsberg isn't so much the
director of a film as the observer
of the forces of chance, which be
seemingly harnesses (if that isn't a

contradiction) by making it the rule

of the game.
The problem with chance, though,
is that it never rises to the level of
tragedy. Tragedy requires more than
chance, according to Aristotle. It
requires the deliberate action of a
character, indeed the mistaken action of a character who thinks he or
she is acting rigbtly but is driven by
a misunderstanding of what right
is. Konigsberg's lament in these
interviews is that he hasn't made
a "great" film, by which he means
one like those by Bergman or Kurosawathat are ineluctably tragic in
their vision.
Knigsberg notes,
I've said over the years that the
only thing standing between
me and greatness is me..., I've
had carte blanche for thirty-five
years and I've never made a great
film. It's just not in me to make a
greatfilm;I don't have the depth
of vision to do it. I don't say to
myself, I'm going to make a great
film and I'm going to be uncompromising. If necessary I'll work
nights and go to the far ends of
the earth. Tliat's just not me. I'd
like to make a greatfilmprovided
it doesn't conflict with my dinner
reservation.
lokes aside, the problem for
Knigsberg may not be a lack of
determination or vision, but rather
that his comedy may provide a more
reliable path to enlightenment than
his drama. As he says, "I have a personal preference and put a greater
value on a successful dramatic piece
than a successful comedy piece." In
his film Melinda ami Melinda (2004)
his characters have a long discussion over dinner about whether a
tragic or a comic view of the world
is more accurate. The film itself tells
the story of the same heroine from
a comic and tragic perspective. But
in that film as well as his others the
depiction of the tragic is more dif-

ficult in his universe, in which there

is no "right" action because there is
no design or will. In Match Point,
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers' character,
in talking with the police investigator, says he hopes that the murderer
will be found so at least there will be
justice in a meaningless world. But
justice can only inhere in a world
that has a notion of justice.
In Crimes and Misdemeanors,
Knigsberg considers the role of
religion in the ontology of justice.
Martin Landau's character, the man
torn by doubts about the meaning
of life and the role of ethics in it, is
counseled by a rabbi, played by Sam
Waterston, at a wedding reception;

The New
Criterion

We see life as fundamentally different: you see it as harsh and

empty of values and pitiless, and
I couldn't go on living if 1 didn't
feel with all my heart a moral
structure with real meaning and
forgiveness and some kind of
higher power. Othervvise there is
no basis to know how to live.
If there is no basis to know how
to live in the nonreligious world
that Knigsberg inhabits, then there
is no way to make a film that will
resonate with meaning- The least
(or maybe most) one can do is make
narratives about the serendipitous
nature of existence and the chancy
nature of chance. At the end ot the
day, or the film, we as the audience
can only watch as the tenni.s ball
hovers at the netmarveling that
there is no way to predict which way
it will fall, and no significance to be
drawn from the direction in which it
ultimately falls.
That's the beauty of chance that
Knigsberg grasps as his final and finally provable thesis. But its also precisely the one that won't allow him
to say anything beyond it. Still, in
the end, it's a prett>' good run for the
moneyand the mindas the camera pulls back and the credits roll.

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