Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen

D. E. Wynter, Klara Szlezák

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349570812, 9781137515469
• eBook ISBN: 9781137515476
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen is a scholarly collection that provides expansive exploration of the auteur's use of intertexuality, referentiality, and fusion of media forms. Its scope is framed by Allen's intermedial phase beginning in 1983 with Zelig and his most recent film.

Part I

Intermediality and Form

1

Zelig: A Simulated Life

Britta Feyerabend

Woody Allen is a true postmodern auteur, which is obvious from his constant experimentation with genres and mixing of techniques in both his fiction and films. Where in fiction, he surprises his readers by mocking scholarly criticism when he deeply analyzes something as banal as, for example, the laundry lists of Metterling (Allen, Getting 141–149), in his films, he also exploits a number of ways to tickle his viewers’ imagination by employing a plethora of established film genres the expectations of which, however, he subverts by disjunctive conjunction. His inter- and metatextual as well as inter- and metacinematic borrowings include references to literature, philosophy, and films to create his own mashup parodies and pastiches. Therefore, this chapter is grounded in an understanding of intertextuality and referentiality as it is proposed by Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon (The Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988, and The Politics of Postmodernism, 1989). Her notion of parody as both legitimizing and subverting its subject (see Politics 101) as well as her interpretation of historiographic metafiction as a tool to understand the past “through its contextualized remains” (Poetics 20) prove to be useful to access Woody Allen’s work. By analyzing the “formation of subjectivity, both the subjectivity of the spectator and that created by the spectator—the Star,” the postmodern insider-outsider doubled position in Zelig “questions the nature of the ‘real’ and its relation to the ‘reel’ through its parody and metacinematic play” (Politics 109). Furthermore, since this chapter will focus on the referentiality and intermediality in Zelig specifically, it will attempt to show how this film exemplifies the Baudrillardian concept of hyperreality through metanarrative strategies. Poststructuralist critic Jean Baudrillard proposed a new take on semiotics when he correlated the logic of late capitalism with the arbitrariness of signs as the logic of linguistics. Baudrillard’s provocative theory works very well to add an understanding of Zelig and the mockumentary genre in general, especially when it comes to the simulation of reality, of hyperreality, which, as Baudrillard proposes, is borne out of an utter lack of a reality of its own and thus comes into existence through simulating itself, faking its own authenticity.

After his successful early comedies, in 1983 Woody Allen completed Zelig to much acclaim. The film was lauded foremost for its groundbreaking technical execution.¹ Allen himself, on the other hand, was mostly interested in the subject rather than the technicality of making the film, as he stated in an interview with Stig Björkman: “All the nice things they said about the film were in reference to the technique. To me, the technique was fine. I mean it was fun to do, and it was a small accomplishment, but it was the content of the film that interested me” (qtd. in Björkman 141). In the film, he takes up a strategy which he had already tried in 1969, that of the mockumentary. With Take the Money and Run, Woody Allen—who wrote the screenplay, directed, and acted in the lead role—parodied the documentary format, when he chronicled the life of the hapless petty criminal Virgil Starkwell, whose career in crime is retold using the usual elements of TV documentary: photographs (such as Starkwell’s mug shots), seemingly dated film clips, and interviews with contemporaries. However, the seeming historicity of the documents is betrayed from the very beginning. The movie would work as a faux-documentary if, at the outset, all scenes showing Starkwell’s youth, crimes, prison time, and private life were said to be re-enactments. Due to its use of sight-gags and slapstick elements, it is clear to the viewer that this is in fact a comedy which merely employs documentary elements to construct a narrative and to make its funny point by use of voice-over narration, photo documents, interviews, and so on.

Not so with Zelig. This being one of the first “serious” mockumentaries, it was so in alignment with the 1980s fashion of documentaries (including the fashionable “Ken Burns” effects of panning and zooming to add life to filmed photograph sources) that an uninitiated audience, or viewers who pay more attention to the visual than to the highly sarcastic commentary, saw large portions of the film without realizing that Zelig was fiction and not documentary. Part of the reason why it works so much better here than in Take the Money and Run is the fact that the movie does not include material that would not have been made historically. We do see Zelig and Fletcher in newsreels, in the filmed psychiatric sessions, we even have a wedding home movie, but those are well within the range of possibility as sound recordings, photography, and even filming were becoming well-accepted forms of documenting science, historical, and private events in the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally, the still present sight-gags are much more subtly included (such as the footage of Zelig sitting on a hospital bed, surrounded by smiling nurses, when it can almost slip one’s attention that his legs have been twisted so severely that his feet are pointing down instead of up).

At the very beginning of the film, initial testimonials of Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, and Saul Bellow introduce the “very bizarre story” (Bellow) of “the phenomenon of the twenties” (Sontag), thereby raising the viewers’ expectations. These highbrow critics would—tongue-in-cheek—participate in the creation of the Zelig myth, thereby adding credibility to this enormous hoax. The fact that these critics contradict each other, however, does not escape the attentive viewer so that the construction of the complete narrative and the judgment thereof, therefore, lies entirely with the viewer him/herself.

The various references used in the movie are literary, journalistic (including tabloid journalism), photographic, filmic (both referencing to movies and newsreels), and critical. These elements each add certain nuances of verisimilitude to modern viewers, while simultaneously creating the Baudrillardian simulacrum of hyperreality: “a real without origin or reality” (Baudrillard 1). In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Baudrillard argues that in the postmodern world, the Western sign system has become a giant “simulacrum—not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference of circumference” (6). According to him, the image undergoes four “successive phases”:

it is the reflection of a profound reality;

it masks and denatures a profound reality;

it masks the absence of a profound reality;

it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (6)

Naturally, such “simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ ” (3), which poses a particular problem to the investigation of sickness, especially psychological disorders. However, it also poses a problem to our understanding of ourselves in historical terms, because “[w]e require a visible past continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us” (10) because “[w]hen the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning” (6). The collapse of the distinction between reality and hyperreality, and the attempt to figure out which is which, is then really what creates the interesting tension the viewer feels when watching Zelig. Documentarian John Grierson once called documentaries “a creative treatment of actuality” (qtd. in Barsam 13). This definition already foreshadows the importance of the aesthetic element, which may make the fact recede. Documentaries, therefore, try to reconstruct a linear historicity, but they are also never truly objective, but rather interpretations of the truth, tinted with socio-political agendas, and marked by selection of material and experts. The mockumentary, on the other hand, makes, as Roscoe and Hight state, “a partial or concerted effort to appropriate documentary codes and conventions in order to present a fictional subject” (2). According to them, it challenges the notion that “the camera does not lie” (11), as “mockumentaries” may “‘look’ like documentaries” (Roscoe and Hight 49), but they “tend to assume an archetypal generic form rather than recognizing the complexities of the genre itself” so that “[m]any … treat the generic form as a given,” which is why the critics argue that “appropriation inherently constructs a degree of latent reflexivity towards the genre” [emphasis in the original] (Roscoe and Hight 50). Mockumentaries thus try to reflect a profound reality, yet, simultaneously they mask that reality, the absence of a reality and, in the end, they no longer bear any resemblance to reality and instead, create their own pure simulacrum. Zelig serves as the perfect example.

Literature

The first “contemporary” witness of Zelig is none other than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who meets Zelig at a Long Island socialite event in 1928. He, the chronicler of the Jazz Age himself writes down in a notebook that he witnessed a “Leon Selwyn, or Zelman” (Allen, Three 8), a republican rubbing elbows with the rich party guests blending in perfectly, but that he later saw the very same man with the staff where he claims he is a democrat and his entire demeanor signals working class. The fact that Allen uses Fitzgerald as the first eyewitness to the phenomenon of Zelig is not surprising. Fitzgerald is generally understood to be the leading author and observer of the Jazz Age,² and by having written the single most iconic novel of the era, The Great Gatsby (1925), he presented the literary predecessor to what Zelig is: a man pretending to be something other than what he is. After all, Jay Gatz consciously does exactly what Zelig does unconsciously: he appears to be what he is not. His wealth stems from bootlegging, his books in the library are uncut (which reveals they were never read and thereby are mere signifiers of a supposedly well-read man), and his parties are spectacles that draw hundreds of guests while all he wants is to impress his long-lost love, Daisy Buchanan. For her, he transforms into a man of her social stratum, blends in and puts up a front. Gatsby, however, unlike Zelig, knows who he is. He blends in, not to be liked by all, like Zelig, but to be loved by her and her only. As Sander H. Lee rightly points out, the relationship between Leonard Zelig and Eudora Fletcher further echoes the relationship between psychiatrist Dick Diver and his patient/wife Nicole in Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender is the Night (147), adding another Fitzgerald parallel but the more open ending adds a distinctly melancholic element to the narrative other than in the expositionally narrated and happily ending Zelig, in which the storyline is a lot more closed.

Zelig wants to please everyone and therefore mirrors everyone he is with, taking the Lacanian concept of the mirror stage “one step further” by not only imitating but becoming his opposite (Feldstein 156). We see this again in another early reference, when Zelig is shown in a photograph with Nobel Prize winner Eugene O’Neill, another iconic writer of the 1920s. Although there is no explanation of what brought the two men together, it is noteworthy that Zelig’s hair and clothing closely resembles that of O’Neill’s and that the two men have the same friendly expression on their faces as well as their hands in their pockets. It is obvious that Zelig emulates his opposite. Eugene O’Neill’s writing therefore provides further clues as to the nature of Zelig’s malady. For example, O’Neill’s protagonist in The Hairy Ape (1922) is Yank, a brutish laborer, who is facing an identity crisis after realizing that he does not fit into the world of the rich and powerful and ends up seeking comfort with a gorilla at the zoo in whose arms he dies. Through the metatextual reference of Yank, Zelig’s own disorder becomes slightly more transparent. He is a man who faces a personal identity crisis as well. His crisis is, however, not only to want to fit in but to forget altogether who he really is. Unlike Gatsby or Yank, Zelig does not merely pretend or parody; he outright transmogrifies into a simulation of his dissimilar companion. His physical adoption of his counterpart’s characteristics shows an extreme (and in fact impossible) assimilation/simulation, which has only one limit: Zelig transforms into men of different sizes or social backgrounds, adopting sociolects, political, religious, or cultural viewpoints seemingly at will. He even changes into different ethnicities (he is seen as Chinese, African American, Native American, or Hassidic Jew), but he does not change into a woman ever. This one border seems insurmountable to this specific patient whose dissociative personality disorder has been taken to the extreme. While the film alludes to this fact, it does not provide an explanation thereof, while it states that further tests will be conducted with “a midget and a chicken” to test the transformational boundaries of the patient (Allen, Three 29).

Minor elements within the narrative also echo other greats of literature: the bullfighting Martin Geist is reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway’s bullfighters (The Sun Also Rises, 1926). Julian Fox also lists “classic antecedents as Jekyll and Hyde [Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886] and Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man, [1857],” Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), as well as the more recent Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952) in which characters morph into others or disappear altogether and become invisible in the eyes of the mainstream (Fox 145). Novels of passing, such as Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) or Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) come to mind as well. Here characters pass as members of a different race in order to elude racial stigmatization. However, Zelig’s transformations do not take place to elude racism. He is not interested in the mainstream notion of acceptability or to blend in with the majority or the powerful. He changes to appease the person directly in front of him at a given moment, whether that person is Asian, Native American, or Black.

The only direct literary reference in Zelig, and one that is made to play a key role in his disorder is, however, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). In one of the early hypnosis sessions, Zelig tells Eudora Fletcher that the first time he behaved like the people surrounding him was when in school, “some very bright people” (Allen, Three 40) discussed Moby-Dick and he was too embarrassed to admit he had never read it. This being the earliest time that Zelig is aware of the transformative effect this white lie has on him, makes it very interesting. After all, should we assume that Allen points to the puzzling question, whether, just as everyone has such white lies in his/her history, could everyone harbor such chameleon qualities? Or, in other words, Zelig can become everyone—could everyone become Zelig?

It becomes clear that Zelig is a mere cypher, an enigma, an empty identity, but his own lack of a personality becomes his gift as he serves as the perfect mirror for his opposites. Being a non-entity actually becoming his strong suit is both comical and tragical: Zelig himself is unable to self-refer, because he appears to be a shifter, a nobody and a somebody simultaneously. After his successful therapy, in which Eudora Fletcher confronts him with the trigger for his disorder (not having wanted to admit to never having read Moby-Dick), Zelig’s plea: “Kids, you gotta be yourself” (Allen, Three 94) suggests that Zelig, finally, has understood the core of his disorder. Zelig’s remission, however, proves to be a short-lived triumph as briefly thereafter, he has a major relapse.

Journalism, the yellow press, and photography

A great part of the fascination with the film comes from the verisimilitude of journalistic documents featured in the film. A plethora of seemingly authentic newspaper clips from the 1920s and 1930s have been inserted to vouchsafe for the enormous interest the contemporary press and public took in the case of Zelig. Initially, the newspapers treat Zelig as an unnamed news item. The first headlines read “BIZARRE DISCOVERY AT MANHATTAN HOSPITAL,” “MIRACULOUS CHANGING MAN PUZZLES DOCTORS,” and “HUMAN WHO TRANSFORMS SELF DISCOVERED” (Allen, Three 24). However, as he becomes famous overnight, they begin to include his name (“ZELIG SAID TO SUFFER UNIQUE MENTAL DISORDER,” Allen, Three 33), thereby making him an instant celebrity. In one interview passage, the (fake) journalists Mike Geibell and Ted Bierbauer, then supposedly with the news tabloid New York Daily Mirror (est. as part of the Hearst organization in 1924), talk about journalistic ethics and the craze over Zelig when they say:

TED BIERBAUER (Sitting in a chair): Well, we knew we had a good story this time, ‘cause it had everything in it. It had romance and it had suspense … .

MIKE GEIBELL (Standing next to Ted): And in those days, you’d do anything to sell papers. (Gesturing) You’d … to get a story, you’d jazz it up, you’d exaggerate; you’d even maybe play with the truth a little bit … but … (Pauses) here was a story. It was a natural. You just told the truth and it sold papers. It never happened before. (Allen, Three 34)

Only, this “truth” is untrue, of course. The two journalists here admit that in newspaper journalism, fact is secondary to the story because the main aspect of running a paper is to sell it. Their joy over the Zelig story is that it already combines the sentimental with the sensational and that here, unlike in other stories, they do not even have to “exaggerate” and “jazz up” anything. In addition, the fact that Geibell and Bierbauer are merely actors portra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Intermediality and Form
• Part II: European Art-Cinema and the Auteur
• Part III: Greek Mythology Revisited
• Part IV: Literary Masters of Nineteenth-Century Realism
• Part V: Referentiality and Transcultural Immersion
• Part VI Identity: Conceptualization and Performance
• Index