Woody Allen's Comic Irony
1987; Salisbury University; Volume: 15; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Politics, and Modernism
ResumoWoody Allen's films can be effectively analyzed in terms of certain literary paradigms and structures of comedy. This synchronic approach is useful because of Allen's own expressed interest in questions of genre and because his work consistently exhibits sophisticated awareness of theories of comedy-Bergson's and Freud's most notably.1 Such an approach is also innovative, for a generic analysis of Allen's films will indicate Allen's distinctive ironies, which at their most artful seem deployed with an almost psychoanalytic interest to prompt his viewers to the acceptance of some reality principle toward which his film comedy points. The disadvantages of such a generic approach are also clear, however: consideration of the problematic film Interiors must be omitted, and the important subject of Allen's artistic development can only be hinted at. In keeping with his essentially black vision, the structure of Woody Allen's films inverts that traditional, circular pattern of romantic comedy first outlined by Northrop Frye and C. L. Barber,2 in which the action moves from an urban center hostile to lovers through a retreat to a green world associated with nature, to arrive at a return of reconciliation in the city. Allen inverts this paradigm first and most obviously by showing that the green world offers nothing, not even heightened consciousness, that might serve as an acceptable antidote to his alienating city scapes. The ostensibly more natural woodland life of the rebels in Sleeper is just as vapid as the sterile, fascist regime that oppresses them. The blue Pacific vistas in Play It Again Sam merely exacerbate Allen Felix's romantic frustrations: instead of experiencing some enabling transformation there, he's beaten up by hoodlums at a roadhouse. In Manhattan, Isaac's brief tryst in the country with Mary Wilke does nothing to enhance their affair; indeed, they still perceive their lovemaking as acting. And perhaps the most bitter of Allen's permutations of the green world is the New Jersey swampland of Broadway Danny Rose: fleeing the Mafia, Danny and Tina wander through the high weeds only to be startled by an actor bedecked in a Flash Gordon cape and costume, fresh from shooting a television commercial nearby. This parody of the notion of being rescued in and by a green world suggests Allen's recurrent theme-that it is impossible by a change of scenery to escape the neuroses and dislocations of contemporary life; Allen's green worlds offer no succour. But it is the ironic nature of the reconciliation-Frye's comic balance (165) or Barber's clarification (10)-that more tellingly measures Allen's subversion of these paradigms. The ambiguous, minor key endings of Play It Again Sam and Annie Hall are well known; but even in the films that end with lovers apparently united-like Zelig and Broadway Danny Rose-the romantic resolutions are, on closer inspection, self-indicting. For example, Zelig's married life to Dr. Fletcher is reduced to an anonymously-written paragraph; in effect, his putative happy ending is of a piece with the film's evocation of a human identity submerged in and defined by intepretive communities outside itself. And the fact that Zelig dies still curious as to the outcome of Moby Dick may be a final symptom of the persistence of his pathetic desire, never fully erased, to fit in. Also, while Danny Rose seems to find happiness with a repentant Tina, his quixotic nobility is finally just one more story told by the gossiping comedians whose narration frames the film. In fact, the endings of Allen's films parody the concept of reconciliation itself. Similarly, Allen has also experimented with the converse of the formula; positing endings in which the viewer is asked to consider apparently outrageous behavior as constituting the final resolution, thereby undermining received expectations of the integration like heterosexual love. Besides parodying television genres, two skits in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex end with the image of traditionally aberrant behavior-transvestism and fetishism-as harmless, even more genuine expressions of humanity than the unctuous, Philistine yet supposedly normal society that serves as its context. …
Referência(s)