Isaw Woody Allen onscreen for the first time as a 17-year-old, a senior at an all-girls Catholic school in a small New England town called Riverside. In the middle-class Rhode Island suburb where I was brought up, the type of person Woody Allen plays in Manhattan — a glib, disaffected, neurotic, middle-aged TV writer — did not exist. Or if they did, I had no knowledge of them — and that’s probably the way it should be, though one really cannot tell the story of Allen’s life and work without thinking at least a little about strange relationships between middle-aged men and high-school-aged girls.
But I met this kind of character through Allen’s movies. They opened me up to the then-unthinkable possibility that life was about something other than gainful employment and relationships designed to lead to marriage. That an adult could not only write for a living but could tire of that work, could quit because they found it too boring, as Isaac Davis, the protagonist of Manhattan does, was strange to me, surrounded as I was by adults who worked far more strenuous jobs in order to live much more modest lives, whose concerns seemed to revolve around supporting their children, sending money back to relatives abroad, and keeping up a respectable veneer, even as the truth of their marriages and family systems were no doubt just as fraught as the sexual dysfunction and romantic indecision Allen’s filmography is so full of.
I’ll be 28 this winter. A decade has passed since I watched these films for the first time, a decade in which I left home, went to college and graduate school, settled in New York and wrote a novel, all while never really registering how unrecognizable my life has become from the way I lived as a child. In months leading up to the publication of my first book this past summer, I gave self-promotional interviews through my computer screen from the second-floor apartment of the Brooklyn brownstone where I now live. I paid my rent each month without giving it a second thought because I was fortunate enough to have income from my book advance. I was single then, living alone. I went to analysis a few times a week, where I talked about my boredom with writing, my anxieties about living a frivolous life in a major city. and other bourgeois nonissues. I spoke to friends who told me they were depressed, late on deadlines, having affairs, or thinking of splitting up with their boyfriends. I felt ambient dread about the potential reception of my novel. In those slow-moving weeks I decided to turn to none other than Woody Allen himself.
I watched and rewatched his oeuvre, comforted by the romantic and now-familiar images of metropolitan skylines, foggy riverfronts. and charming interiors populated by bohemians and pseudointellectuals to whom nothing bad happens except for heartbreak. Viewing these films a decade after seeing them for the first time, rather than looking at their casts from a distance with a mix of awe, pity, and confusion, I felt my own, real ambivalence about my proximity to people, or even my own similarities ro Isaac Davis. I was sad to realize I, too, had become a glib, disaffected, neurotic writer.
Distracting myself with Allen’s archive, I saw that what his films offered were predictable and often masterful riffs on the themes I had come to expect from the director: married people falling in love with technically unavailable, also married partners; solipsistic writers using self-deprecation to conceal their vanity; the aimless search for meaning in Uptown restaurants. Interiors, Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Bananas, Another Woman, Husbands and Wives, Hannah and Her Sisters — in Allen’s case I don’t think it is pejorative to say that if you have seen one, you have seen them all. Woody Allen, at his best, imports directors like Bergman, Buñuel. and Trauffat for popular American audiences. It’s Fellini for philistines or Hitchcock with less heft. It is what, among other things, Joan Didion accused Allen of in her 1979 New York Review of Books essay on the director. What Didion gets wrong about Allen’s films, however, is that their frivolity and navel-gazing are not oversights but part of their design. They are middlebrow romantic comedies and not works of social realism.
If Allen’s films do not entirely transcend their genre, they represent the very best of it by sticking to what they do well: selling a fantasy of New York City. While sitting in my boyfriend’s living room in London rewatching Manhattan I saw the black and glowing East River onscreen and I was reminded of the final line of Ursula Parrot’s novel Ex-Wife: “New York lights blurred behind us…that was a shining city.” In Allen’s films, the city does have a sheen that is witnessed more rarely in life. My writing this essay now in my Brooklyn apartment is in some ways a testament to the allure of his plots, settings, and casts.
“New York was his town and it always would be,” I remember Isaac Davis saying in Manhattan. Initially, it came to my ears as a neutral declaration of identification with a hometown, an enthusiastic connection to one’s geographical origins that I did not possess. I have no strong sense of regional identity — this was not something my family particularly modeled or valorized — but I’ve always admired it in New Yorkers. Whether it is real or contrived, I respect their investment in their home and all the myriad ways this sense of identification manifests racially, socially, and politically. I imagine that when the late Caribbean American drill rapper Pop Smoke called himself a New Yorker, he meant something different from what Allen, born in 1935 to a middle-class Jewish family in Midwood, meant when he made the films Pauline Kael described as an “ongoing poem to love and New York City,” and that is a testament to the city’s richness.
These different perspectives are not on display in Allen’s films; the auteur’s general indifference to depicting the problems that plague most working adults in one of the most expensive cities in the world can feel callous. A generous reading is that these narratives do not take place in reality but in the realm of Allen’s wishes and fantasies. His characters may be hypochondriacs, but they never get seriously ill or go bankrupt from medical bills. They may quit their jobs, but they never fear impoverishment. If they misbehave sexually, they don’t fear ostracization or professional fallout. This last one, however, may be the most lifelike aspect of his films.
