While at the 68th annual Cannes
film festival recently promoting his newest film, director Woody Allen took the
opportunity in an interview to expound upon his personal philosophy. For those who still consider Allen a
comedian and filmmaker of mostly comedies, his worldview will no doubt seem
surprisingly grim.
Allen acknowledged that he “had to be a comic
filmmaker because that’s where my gifts were,” but he “had always wanted to be
a serious filmmaker” like Ingmar Bergman. And by serious he means depressing:
No matter how much the philosophers talk to
you or the priests or the psychiatrists, the bottom line… is life has its own
agenda and it runs right over you while you’re prattling. We’re all going to
wind up in a very bad position someday. The same position, but a bad one.
No argument there. Life does have a habit of
steamrolling over the best-laid plans of mice and men, and we are all going to end up dead. But for
Allen, the bad news doesn’t stop there:
In the end it has no meaning. We live in a
random universe and you’re living a meaningless life, and everything you create
in your life or do is going to vanish, and the Earth will vanish and the sun
will burn out and the universe will be gone.
All the great Western philosophers, he said,
felt that “too much reality is too much to bear.” And so the way we bear it is,
“you turn on a baseball game or you watch a Fred Astaire movie or you do
something that distracts you” from this grim truth. “That’s what I do,” says
Allen. “I distract myself. Making movies is a wonderful distraction.” Filmmaking,
or even watching films, “is a nice thing to keep you busy. I’m not thinking
about my death, the decaying of my body, that I will be old – one day – in the
very distant future,” said the 79-year-old.
Similarly, for his actors, acting is their
distraction:
They’re worried about their part. If they
weren’t doing that they’d be home or sitting on a beach… and they’d be
thinking, “My God, what is life about? I’m going to be alone, I’m going to die,
my loved ones are going to die. Will I get Ebola?”
The problem with this perspective is that, in
a universe devoid of meaning or consequences, it is all too easy to see oneself
as the ultimate arbiter of morality, or to reject morality altogether.
One could speculate that this nihilistic
worldview is the driving force behind some of Allen’s movies like Match Point and his latest, Irrational Man, in which his protagonists
believe themselves to be above morality – beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche
might say.
The “existential comedy-drama” Irrational
Man, for example, is centered
on a college philosophy professor (played by the brilliant but weird Joaquin
Phoenix) who finds meaning in his bleak existence after eavesdropping on a
conversation in a diner leads him to concoct the perfect crime. “This is the
meaningful act I was searching for!” he passionately explains to his co-star
Emma Stone.
I was reminded of the shocking film The Vanishing (the original Dutch-French
film, not the Hollywood remake starring Jeff Bridges – neither directed by
Allen), in which the lead character carries out a kidnapping and murder simply
in order to feel the godlike power of life and death over his victim.
While this Nietzschean theme may make for a
darkly chilling movie experience, it’s also a very empty, disturbing one. It’s
certainly Woody Allen’s right as an artist to explore such a theme, but
ultimately the result is not merely a failure as distraction, but a moral
failure as well.
It’s also easy to speculate that his
philosophy may be behind the disturbing sexual controversies in Allen’s own
real life. After all, if there is no ultimate source of morality and no meaning
to your existence or actions, if there is no point to our lives except to fill
them with distractions to pass the time, if any consequences are eventually going
to be obliterated by the sun swallowing the earth, then what’s the point of
abiding by moral boundaries? It is then a very short step to the guilt-free
pursuit of distractions that satisfy your worst impulses.
Perhaps it’s unfair to read that into Allen’s
personal life. Perhaps not. But how different Allen’s life and work might have
been if he had long ago rejected the nihilism that says we and the universe we
inhabit are nothing but a void.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 5/26/15)
