Cinematic Betrayal in Joe Wright's Atonement (2007)

(Cross-posted at Become What You Behold)
Atonement is too pretty. I liked most of the film, but couldn’t take my eyes off of Keira Knightly. She was too elegant. Her language was too perfect. I didn’t pay much attention to Briony, and focused instead on the budding picture perfect romance between Cecilia and Robbie. Joe Wright’s new film has all of the visual elements of a Jane Austen novel, something that made his Pride and Prejudice so compelling (or so I am told) and his adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel a little too polished. The movie included a scene depicting 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk that Roger Ebert called “one of the great takes in film history.” I agree, and this is precisely the problem. Wright’s adaptation of McEwan’s novel is too enamored with its own beauty and sacrifices the complexities of the novel for an obsession with its celebrity proponents.

Wright’s choice to direct a McEwan novel after his adaptation of Austen is somewhat appropriate, as Atonement begins with a quote from Austen’s Northanger Abbey. McEwan’s novel is concerned with the themes Austen employs in her novels, including the negative side of unbounded imagination and the need for maturity and rational thinking instead of Romantic enthusiasm. While the book focuses on Briony’s journey towards adulthood and understanding, the film focuses much of its attention on the twin stories of separated lovers. Briony as an adult is portrayed in the film by the frumpified Romola Garai. Garai fades into the background, demurely accepting the harsh criticism of Cecilia and Robby’s failed love. This aspect of Atonement could be read as an allegory of celebrity culture. Briony looks like a World War II version of Tina Yothers compared to the beauty of Cecilia and the neatly rough-hewed masculinity of Robbie.

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Do politics exist?

A not-so-favorable review of the Dylan movie, I'm Not There (previously discussed, and contra others).  Most provocative excerpt being this:

It was during a recreation of the London concert at which a betrayed folk fan screamed “Judas!” at Dylan that I realized the best analogy for I’m Not There is Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Only Gibson’s film is equal in its commitment to surreal reverence and literalism. The truly unbearable aspect of the Passion was not its primeval anti-Semitism or pornographic bloodshed; it was its predictability. Despite being a story that so many know down to its barest details (in four separate versions), Gibson retold it with grinding exactitude. Even Gibson’s recourse to dead languages had no effect on the film’s sense of inevitability. The horror that dawned on me when I realized that I knew – and that everyone who had read the Gospel of Matthew (or Ginsberg’s “Howl”) knew – the Aramaic for “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (“Eli, eli, lamma sabacthani?”) was the same horror that gripped me when I realized I’m Not There couldn’t resist a recreation of the “Dylan-goes-electric” 1965 Newport folk festival, replete with the apocryphal story of Pete Seeger attempting to take an axe to the electric cords because he couldn’t hear Dylan explaining that he wasn’t going to work on Maggie’s farm anymore.

Meanwhile the real beef on Saval's part appears to be two-fold:

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Tyger and Becoming-Artifical

Hi.  I'm Tharmas, but I listed my username as Roger Whitson.  I've been fascinated by this film short from Brazilian filmmakers Guilherme Marcondes and Andrezza Valentin for almost a year without knowing precisely what to do with it:

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A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true [updated]

Having just watched the later, 60's film version of Hemingway's The Killers (after the Tarkovsky and Burt Lancaster) featuring one Ronald Reagan, I cannot help but feel I understand these comments about "time and space" in a whole new way.  Ronald was an odd duck wasn't he (the word, "stilted" seems invented just for him, back when art of faux-working class swagger and unflinching confidence was quite enough).  A common thought:  why was America always so much behind the times?  Anyway this guy Rx is saying something very much in the manner of cognitive dissonance with this mashup; perhaps usefully provoking: Download freedom101Rx.mov

Those familiar with the story and even those not may find this engaging article by Ron Berman useful reading:

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Deserving jibes at Sartre, included

This space has been on an absolute roll lately. Go see. Courtesy of, and since we're watching film, the following may be of interest, particularly in light of recent conversations:

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Hear the Kossacks Call

What's funniest about all of this "Path to 9/11" humbug:  the 9/11 Commission Report was itself politically white-washed crock of shit.    Sorry to spoil the party (and sign the petition, please*) but still someone had to say it.

*particularly if–like most LS lurkers–you are a centrist with any cred.

Update 9/10:  Oh wouldn't you know it, "The Path to 9/11" is linked directly to David Horowitz (where does that man get all his money?):

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Dead Man's Chest

Based on a song from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the subtitle of Gore Verbinski's newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, “Dead Man’s Chest,” is actually a pun. Taken literally, it refers to the chest cavity of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), the (un)dead captain of the Flying Dutchman. Jones’ torso is of interest here because it is actually empty—Jones having carved out his own heart due to loneliness (or heartbreak), locked it in an elaborate wooden chest, and then buried on a remote island. In this way, Jones was attempting to rid himself of a potential weakness, but in practice he succeeds only in displacing and externalizing that vulnerability. The heart, together with the (wooden) chest now containing it, therefore, become Jones’ Achilles heel, insofar as the destruction of the heart will cause Jones to lose his powers, and all of those (dead or undead) who have previously sold their souls to him would thereby be released from their debts.

Among those who had sold their souls to Davy Jones is the movie’s protagonist, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), who previously made a Mephistophelean pact with Jones in order to acquire his ship, the Black Pearl. Now that his debt has come due (condemning Sparrow to spend a century working on Jones’ ghost ship), Sparrow’s only hope lies in finding the buried chest (and the heart it contains), and destroying it.

Although ostensibly a sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003), Dead Man’s Chest can perhaps be more profitably viewed as an unorthodox sequel to Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 animated feature, Howl’s Moving Castle (Hauru no ugoku shiro). In particular, Castle, like Chest, revolves around a displaced heart—in this case, that of the sorcerer Howl (voiced by Takuya Kimura in the Japanese version, and by Christian Bale in the English), who dreams longingly of a fantastic moving castle. In an exquisite moment of wish-fulfillment, Howl’s own heart is then transferred to a falling star, which then becomes animated as the fire demon Calcifer—the soul and furnace of the gothic “moving castle” which Howl had dreamed of possessing. This displaced heart then comes to assume an unanticipated significance when Howl is joined by Sophie (Chieko Baisho/Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons)—a girl who has been transformed into an old lady by a curse, but who subsequently travels with Howl in the castle and effectively "steals his heart."

In both movies, therefore, disembodied hearts function to distance their former owners from their own feelings and desires (and, arguably, moral centers), and in return help them to achieve an unprecedented mobility and autonomy (viz., Jones’ Flying Dutchman, Howl’s moving castle and, at one remove, Sparrow’s ship, the Black Pearl, which he will lose if he does not succeed in finding Jones’ heart). Equally importantly, just as these disembodied hearts are located at the periphery of the embodied subject, similarly the vehicles which they help to secure circulate at the margins of the national/imperial body politic. Both Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones, for instance, are pirates (albeit a ghostly one, in the case of Jones) operating on the margins of the seventeenth century British empire, and Howl, formerly the prized apprentice of the English king’s head sorceress, also moves pirate-like through the kingdom in his ambulatory castle, declining requests that he lend his formidable powers to the king to help win the war (based on a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, the movie appears to be set in Britain during an unspecified war reminiscent of WWI) .

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a date which will live in infamy

A follow up to Jodi's post, and the comments below it.

The concluding paragraph of Benjamin's Work of Art essay:

"Fiat ars - pereat mundus," says Fascism, and, as Marienetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of "l'art pour l'art." Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of a politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

Relatedly, think back to the summer before the attack, the Pearl Harbor trailer. Christ - the damn thing actually ran for about a year before every single movie that made it to the theater. I must have seen it thirty times.

Think back to FDR's speech that runs as a voiceover, as we watch the kids pretend to be fighter pilots, soliders screw nurses, women hang out laundry. The everyday.

How long is America going to pretend that the world is not at war?

From Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo, we have been described as a nation of weaklings and playboys, who hire British or Russian or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us.

We've been trained to think that we are invincible. But our people think Hitler and his Nazi thugs are Europe's problem. We have to do more. Does anyone think that victory is possible without facing danger? At times like these we all need to be reminded of who we truly are - that we will not give up.

December 7th, 1941. A date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the empire of Japan.

We are war. Tell that to the soldiers who today are hitting hard in the far waters of the Pacific. Tell that to the boys in the flying fortresses. Tell that to the Marines.

Toward the end of the trailer, subtitles appear on screen:

it was the end of innocence and the dawn of a nation's greatest glory.

Think of how focus-grouped and wideband market-prepped this movie was. The trailer in particular. Think about what secret or not so secret desires the producers were touching, titillating, conjuring?

The contemporary reviews were on message:

Ninety minutes into this massive movie the attack commences, and the spectacular images come hurtling like fireballs. This is, let's be honest, what we're here for, and what most Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movies serve up best: the poetry of destruction (Newsweek).

The picture is nearly painstaking in its traditionalism, a tale of love, war, and valor in which nostalgia for ''simpler times'' gets mashed together, almost fetishistically, with nostalgia for old movies and for the spirit of knightly self sacrifice during World War II (Entertainment Weekly)

Telepathy, for sure. If we have to know anything, it is that the causes of things aren't always as straight and clear as Occam's Razor might suggest.

Shohei Imamura (1926-2006)

Clip from The Pornographers

Spinoza's Cubism

Eadweard Muybridge, Nude Descending Stairs

I say expressly that the mind does not have an adequate knowledge, of itself, its own body, and external bodies whenever it perceives things from the common order of nature, that is, whenever it is determined externally - namely by the fortuitous run of circumstance - to regard this or that, and not when it is determined internally, through its regarding several things at the same time, to understand their agreement, differences, and their opposition. For whenever it is conditioned internally in this or another way, then it sees things clearly and distinctly, as I shall later show. (Ethica II, scholium to prop. 29)

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

poshlost'

"Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo–these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost' in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, mothmythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know..."

Or:

"A well-rounded, untranslatable whole made up of banality, vulgarity, and sham. It applies not only to obvious trash (verbal and animate), but also to spurious beauty, spurious importance, spurious cleverness"

–Vladimir Nabokov

King Kong.  Baudrillard.  Shopping Malls.  Disney Land.  MTV.  Dave Eggers. 

On some level one cannot help but recognize the sheer dominance of these forces.   Speaking generally, they are the air we breath.  This does not mean that they are natural.  Liberals (the politicians, not the ideals of any philosophy - which for many reasons, such as Capitalism, do not exist) would have more nuanced cooking shows, a slightly better quality of life for slightly more people for a slightly longer time.  A stronger, more gentle war on various emotional states.  Their prospects, of course, hinge on a fundamental delusion of sorts – namely a world where conservatives (at their current stage on the several-decades-developing road to fascism) simply do not exist.  Indeed, much of the liberal delusion consists of an elaborate maintainence of this snobbery.*  (And, to be fair, much of the conservative machine depends on exploiting the resentment springing from this impression.)  Those are all familiar enough complaints, to be sure.  And like everywhere, such generalizations are perhaps only useful up to a certain point.

If it is even worth mentioning (and I'm not convinced it is), this realm is nevertheless where a stupid film like Team America hits hardest.   
It "hits" in the sense that it literally performs a kind of violence on its audience (a violence for which we have very few words, yet – apart from the usual phrases, "beating over the head," "insulting the intelligence," "forced to consume," etc.)  Lenny Bruce's form of satire comes to mind (and yet, is it funny?  Really?).  That it panders equally to liberals and conservatives is perhaps worthy of a chuckle.  It's also of somewhat Zizekian topicality, in fact.  I wonder if he's seen it.  But to mistake this film for a "critique" of anything would surely be going too far (again recalling a certain Zizek). 

Having so warned against generalizations, I will now proceed to generalize.  I do think there is some wisdom in making an effort not to speak of the banal, or at least to do so carefully, and not in a manner that treats it with any more dignity than that with which it may handle us.

Continue reading “poshlost'”

Look Now, Pay Later

For a time and  time and time and time and time and time of fear, he already had a few brave words:

Perhaps we should warn you that there is one thing you won’t read, and that is a pat answer for the problems of life. We don’t pretend to make this a spiritual or psychological patent-medicine chest where one can come and get a pill of wisdom, to be swallowed like an aspirin, to banish the headaches of our times.

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Three Days of the Condor

Turner: Do we have plans to invade the Middle East?

Higgins: Are you crazy?

Turner: Am I?

Higgins: Look, Turner…

Turner: Do we have plans?

Higgins: No. Absolutely not. We have games. That's all. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do.

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Der Ister

It's about time. As you know, easy bootlegs of criminally over-priced DVD's are a horrible, horrible thing, and should never under any circumstances be spontaneously shared, and especially not with any members of well-deserving international group philosophy weblogs who just happen to reside in the United States.

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Speaking From His Island

Vinterberg on Bergman:

“At film school, we did a Bergman course where we saw his first 12 films. Then, later on, I saw Fanny and Alexander and some of the more popular ones. I could tell this was a film-maker who was fantastically precise, with deep psychology, and that he was giving me insight into human beings I hadn't seen before. Some of those close-ups of those beautiful Swedish actresses have just stayed with me. He created female characters you fell in love with instantly and exposed their burning inner life in a way I have not seen before or since.

After I made Festen, I called him. He was very, very lively, speaking from his island. I was expecting to hear from a more bitter man. He said he would do no more work and now he would find the time to sit in a corner in his house and read some of those marvellous books he never got to read. He told me Festen was a masterpiece, which I was very happy about, but he talked about how silly and stupid Dogme was. We invited him once to do a Dogme film, but he didn't want to do it. I tried to explain why Dogme wasn't silly, but I very quickly gave in. He wasn't going to change his opinion, no matter what I said. I've only talked to him on one occasion. It was so uplifting. If I can feel like he does at that age, life isn't that bad.”

Though Bergman’s my favourite director I’m not sure I agree with him that Dogme was “silly”. I’m sure he knew how self-mockingly Puritan were its strictures about film-making. And he must have recognized in it the same back-to-basics aspiration that drove a Truffaut or a Godard. There’s something in the low-tech beauty of a film like Through a Glass Darkly that actually shares much in common with Dogme. But I’ll forgive him for the comment. And I’ll forgive him for his latest (and last?) film, Saraband, which is somewhat disappointing. But even Bergman’s bad films are good.

further animalia, this time without pictures

More utterly hilarious Cliché War fallout from "The March of the Penguins" here.  Penguins, yes, those deceptively difficult to caricature creatures in a savage land whose greatest feat is having mastered the cocktail party effect.  I've since updated my previous post, in case you only skimmed the horrendous bloglines version (many thanks to S. for pointing out that penguins don't actually "prune" themselves, as in spontaneously lop off their own limbs, so much as "preen," etc.)  What follows are a few more thoughts on 'the animal', patched together from a further reading of John Berger and then turning toward Agamben.  Apologies in advance for their somewhat scattered, well bloggish quality.  Any comments or criticisms more than welcome.

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Penguins: Hopping Across the Frozen Bathos

“For we shall have to ask ourselves, inevitably, what happens to the fraternity of brothers when an animal enters the scene.”

–Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I am (More to Follow)”

You can imagine the shock the world felt–if kept silent–when for once the Americans took something that was French and made it better.  Thankfully though, there are still some people trying desperately to fuck it up:

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Bärenhunger

A moment in Herzog’s latest film, Grizzly Man, where the director steps over the line he has carefully marked out for himself in his previous documentaries. Herzog has been careful not to judge Timothy Treadwell, whose last footage forms the substance of this strange film. His interjections have been limited to pointing up the inconsistencies in Treadwell’s eco-activist worldview, the inability to explain why his beloved animals would kill one another, his contradictory image as a loner when he has taken someone with him to his Alaskan wilderness, his breaking of his own rule on keeping a distance from the bears who would eventually kill him. Of course Herzog has also let many others speak on Timothy’s behalf, and it is these who the director must have known would damn him (and often themselves) in what makes for the film’s embarrassing humour. But all of a sudden, Herzog feels the need to give his “very different” view of nature than that to which Treadwell subscribes. For Herzog nature is not benevolent but “brutal and chaotic”. A strange hyperbolical interjection, and one which does not fully stand up. It seems a lapse on the director’s part, having already told us that Treadwell’s surviving footage tells us “as much about civilization as it does about nature”, since the social lens through which the “chaotic” and the “brutal” come into focus is left unexamined. The order that emerges out of individually random actions, and the moving line between brute and social animal is ignored. The dispassionate (though never uninterested) documentarist this author has come to admire from Land of Silence and Darkness to Ten Thousand Years Older has become - momentarily - an uncritical ideologue.

Otium Tibi Molestum Est

After having spent the entire afternoon in daydreams I opened a book and found this.

The Most Beautiful Six Minutes in the History of Cinema

                              

Sancho Panza enters the cinema of a provincial town. He is looking for Don Quixote and finds him sitting apart, staring at the screen. The auditorium is almost full, the upper circle - a kind of gallery - is packed with screaming children. After a few futile attempts to reach Don Quixote, Sancho sits down in the stalls, next to a little girl (Dulcinea?) who offers him a lollipop. The show has begun, it is a costume movie, armed knights traverse the screen, suddenly a woman appears who is in danger. Don Quixote jumps up, draws his sword out of the scabbard, makes a spring at the screen and his blows begin to tear the fabric. The woman and the knights can still be seen, but the black rupture, made by Don Quixote's sword, is getting wider, it inexorably destroys the images. In the end there is nothing left of the screen, one can only see the wooden structure it was attached to. The audience is leaving the hall in disgust, but the children in the upper circle do not stop screaming encouragements at Don Quixote. Only the little girl in the stalls looks at him reprovingly.

                                                                                                               

What shall we do with our fantasies? Love them, believe them - to the point where we have to deface, to destroy them (that is perhaps the meaning of the films of Orson Welles). But when they prove in the end to be empty and unfulfilled, when they show the void from which they were made, then it is time to pay the price for their truth, to understand that Dulcinea - whom we saved - cannot love us.

                            

- Giorgio Agamben, Profanations

What Will We Tell the Children?

Inspired by The Skeleton Key, K-punk has posts about beliefs and disavowed beliefs here and here.

In the film, Caroline, a young woman with no interest in the supernatural, finds herself in the swamps of the American South. There hoodoo is practiced, which is presented as a kind of bad magic that only has an effect on those who believe in it. To help an old man who thinks he is under a spell, or at least Caroline thinks he thinks he is, she performs some of the rites and this makes her vulnerable to the magical rituals. By acting as if she believes, she has become a believer.

K-punk convincingly links this tension between the direct belief and the belief in the other's belief, between the believers and the people who will only perform the ritual practices if they are confident that they 'know they mean nothing', to commodity fetishism. But he also writes "that there is no 'naive consumer' who believes commodities are animate beings," and this made me wonder: aren't disavowed beliefs always articulated against the background of the naivety, the innocence of children? Perhaps it's no coincidence that in a key scene of the film - the primal scene, so to speak - parents are violently upset, not by a hoodoo ceremony taking place in their home, but by the fact that their son and daughter witness it.

Similarly, nobody worries for their own sake about violent computer games, pornographic images or news of depraved presidents. These concerns are formulated in relation to the point of view of children. And maybe the same is even true for commodity fetishism: while not many people think much of their own continuous exposure to advertisements, there is definitely something disturbing about marketing and publicity that is aimed at young kids.

The role of the child is crucial here, as Octave Mannoni wrote in the essay Je sais bien, mais quand même: "Many adults are ready to admit - though the absurdity of the thing sometimes makes them hesitate - that they are not religious for themselves, but for the children. And the important place children have in the organisation of beliefs cannot be explained only in relation to the care for their spiritual development." The same thing can be said about this particular commodity, the horror film, which after all is usually taboo for young audiences. Ratings not only exist to protect innocent souls against terrifying stories, but at the same time help to convince others that children will really believe those tales.

Law and Disorder/Looking Backward

Oh, radio...Following on from here, and for all you libertarians out there, a fascinating discussion of surveillance cameras from WBAI.  (Who are the real paranoiacs, those thinking and talking about the implications of public surveillance, or those putting the cameras there in the first place?)  It's an hour long mp3, but worth it.

Update:  If you'll permit me a lengthy side note, I thought I'd share some excerpts from an essay John Berger wrote in response to Susan Sontag's book On Photography.  It seems rather pertinent.

Update II:  See also this issue of Surveillance and Society (courtesy of wood s lot).

Continue reading “Law and Disorder/Looking Backward”

I'm no f&cking Buddhist, says Bjork & Zizek

Link: Revenge of Global Finance, by Slavoj Zizek.

I like this article from Zizek. Watching the stupid film I turned after Yoda's 'let go of everything' speech to someone or rather, and said to a friend: "fucking Buddhist". I like the "fucking" here, for it in itself announces a passionate dislike - itself an attachment, and one I refuse to let go of despite seeing my amigos one by one succumbing to the true Dark side. In this very attachment I announce my desire for the Other, my desire to refuse this capitalist supplement of meditating after a hard day's work. Instead I have a Guinness and blog (pardon the self-referentiality at this exact moment).

But I'm a copycat here: Bjork said it first, no doubt because many confused her as such.
"I’m no fucking buddhist, but this is enlightenment" (from "Alarm Call").

Zizek's `most interesting' point, I think, is that the reason the Revenge of the Sith seemed so bland, so narratively inferior, is because Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader was not, as it should have been, because he became Evil precisely because of his zealousness to battle Evil, but simply because he was weak-willed. Boring, especially if Lucas really wanted to make a political point... (though I'd say Bush's handlers are Evil from the get-go, not that they are perverted in their very quest for `rooting out' Evil - or if so, they were perverted a long, long time ago...). Anyway, this explains why it lacked "the proper tragic grandeur... Anakin should have become a monster out of his very excessive attachment with seeing Evil everywhere and fighting it".

ADDENDUM (for those not familiar with Zizek's understanding of Christianity, i.e., for those who aren't aware that he is, in fact, an atheist):

Part of the logic in the background of this article is that to be an atheist (as Zizek is), one must pass through the Christian experience.

Christianity is the only religion where God dies. When Christ dies on the Cross, God dies too. God only remains, then, through the faith of Christians (in the Holy Spirit, the community of believers). Obviously, then, Christians are likely to waver in their faith. This can lead to extreme violence towards others in the desperate attempt to `shore up' one's wavering faith.

It can also lead to atheism. We can only be atheist because of Christianity. If we just reject the Christian legacy tout court, we are only presupposing a dumb pagan or Buddhist God from which we cannot find a path to atheism.

There is, then, nothing more regressive than denying `our' Christian legacy.

(Of course, if you get this confused with the neocon agenda, I shall have to bonk you over the head.)

Two New York Jewish Exiles Kibbitz about Woody Allen

                                           

Alain:

As a Bourgeois New York Leftist Jew "in exile" in Minnesota, Woody Allen’s films express a great deal about me and the life "I could have lived."

I recently revisited Annie Hall. While not as funny as I remembered, there were many themes that were familiar and reminded me of several of his other works. My point of discussion is "The self-image of the Jew." I will be speaking in the grossest generalities, and speaking on behalf of my people in a way that is inexcusable. But I will ask you to excuse me nonetheless. J

What Woody Allen does is represent a certain self-image of the Jew as eternally suffering from their own displacement. It is not the simple "home sickness" of all traditional romanticism. Rather, it is the sense of not ever having had a place to start, to have always already been looking for a home that we have never had. (Maybe Derrida’s notion of an "originary supplement" would fit this description as well?)

Near the beginning of Annie Hall, Allen is telling a friend that a mutual acquaintance is both politically conservative and anti-Semitic, justifying this with the claim that he asks Allen questions like " How is he Jewing?" and "What are you Jewing Later?" "Could Jew pass me the bagel?" Besides the fact that I have had the same bizarre experience in Minnesota numerous times, it speaks to the Jewish belief that they are constantly the object of scorn and ridicule.

Perhaps the academic cliché of "The Jew" (Le Juif) as the signifier par excellence for the excluded, has never been as clearly articulated as it has by Allen. In several of his films he quotes the Groucho Marx line: "I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." Why does that have a particular meaning for Jews? I would suggest that the centuries of real persecution have created an internal anguish of never being at home in one’s own skin. Either the club is lowering its standards to let me in (in which case it is unworthy and condescending) or I cannot accept that I (or "my people") have "arrived" to such a point that I somehow belong.

This also reminds me of scene from Stardust Memories (not one of his best films) where Allen has this repetitive dream in which he is riding on a train. It is filled with freaks and weirdoes, many of whom look "Semitic." He looks out the window and sees a train on parallel tracks, full of "beautiful" people laughing and having a great time. He starts to flirt with a very attractive, very "goyish" looking woman (which turns out to be Sharon Stone’s first appearance on film). She gestures to him that he should come over and join her train but Allen is trapped. In fact, his train and hers eventually break off, going in opposite directions. He longs to be on the beautiful train but he knows he will forever be stuck with the misfits.

Other than the personal neurosis that is involved in this account, does it not express something fundamental about a certain self-image of the Jew that seems rather dated? Having grown up watching Allen’s films, they certainly resonate with me personally. (While I did not marry Annie Hall (who was from Wisconsin), I did marry a shiksa and moved to the mid-west.) Yet many of the Jews I know that are my age or younger find it completely foreign to their self-understanding? Why? I think it is because most American Jews have finally assimilated to such a degree that they do not feel this sense of alienation. That is not to say that many of them are not religious, or that they are not "proud" of their heritage. Rather, they have taken over and fully incorporated mainstream American values; to make it and participate in the American Dream is to achieve a certain level of economic success, or at least accept that success is defined in this way. Jews have simply given up their cultural distinctness and concern for others and exchanged it for the convenience of consumer culture. (In Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen thinks he is dying and tries to find meaning in his life. He visits various houses of worship and gurus. One day, after visiting a Catholic Church, he comes home with a bag of groceries. As he empties the bag, he takes out his bread, a jar of mayonnaise, and several pieces of Catholic paraphernalia, such as a bible and rosary beads.)

Likud Judaism has largely colonized America post 9/11 and so I wonder if Allen’s schtick has a place anymore? Perhaps because I am still not a member of the club, his brand of Jewish self-effacement still has appeal.

_______________________________________________________

Alphonse:

This resonates for me in so many directions I don't know where to start.

Zelig

was on television here the other night; one is tempted to see it as a film that was made to be just the straight subtext of all the other films, standing alone without all the paraphernalia of narrative.

I grew up on 89th street and Riverside Dr. where of course I escaped even the slightest consciousness that being Jewish was at all unusual. Everyone was Jewish, whether Jewish or not, on the Upper West Side then. I'm not sure I even heard the word Jewish in childhood - what would be the need? Really it wasn't until I moved to England that I became aware that Woody Allen is really Jewish. It will sound weird except to New Yorkers but his extra special Jewishness never occurred to me - I just didn't see it. But as far as his audience outside NY is concerned, he belongs to an us - and in England journalists still write international Jewry in the newspaper to refer to that us - not to Hollywood, not to America, not even to NY, but to Jews. Our property and our spokesperson. Through this realization about Woody Allen, whom everyone in Bath Spa somehow worked into conversations with me, baffling me for a time (Woody Allen, everyone talks about Woody Allen in Somerset? Who knew?) that I became aware that I am really Jewish, in other peoples eyes. And that this makes me exotic. (In the UK that is. In Paris this is not the case; no one knows, for example, which politicians are Jewish here, but in the UK, everyone knows which politicians are Jewish. A review in a British paper of Joshua Bell in recital managed to mention that he is Jewish. I never even would have wondered. Must have been a disappointment to those trying to compile the Great Goyish Violinists cd.)

But at the same time that my own and Woody Allen's Jewishness were always invisible to me, my NewYorkerness wasn't, and perhaps - and perhaps Woody Allen is even to blame for this - stood in its place. That New Yorker Magazine cover which showed the rest of the US as a thin line at the end of NY really captured something, but missed the actual fear instilled in children of the Upper West Side in the 70s of the rest of the country. I remember my father telling me of his time in the army he spent in Biloxi, Mississippi. The whole idea of Biloxi, Mississippi to me was terrifying. As terrifying as Nazi Germany. A foreign, frightening place I would never willingly go and would expect to be unwelcome. It certainly wasn't 'my country.' Nothing was, except NY.

That homelessness thing you speak of: its curious that Woody Allen riffs on it - on Jewishness per se - specifically as a form of over emotional, romanticized place-belonging, of the ersatz semi-voluntary and yet ineluctable citizenship of NewYorkerness; its hard to untangle what in Allen is revealing or satirizing or commenting on Jewishness (homelessness) and what is commenting on passionate NewYorkerness (an excess of rootedness, an obsession with a fairly small urban locale.) In Husbands and Wives, the Allen character is talking to Farrow, his wife, about wanting to spend time in Europe, live in Paris for a while, and she bursts his balloon with a reminder that he can't survive off the island of Manhattan for more than 24 hours. It's a joke, but only a slight exageration of the New Yorkerness I grew up around - which included a suspicion that we - New Yorkers, but I understand now the modifier was Jews - really couldn't survive elsewhere. The character of that horror fantasy was formed by the film Deliverance. Which took place, as far as I was concerned, simply in "America." Somewhere outside New York City.

(Surely that New Yorkerness is a variation on the theme of universal gentile anti-semitism found in Herzl and analyzed by Arendt. The tangle of 'rootless cosmopolitanism' and the fetishizing and romanticism of the cosmopolis - Berlin and Paris before NY - as specifically a replacement for a homeland, a safe haven of a different order than a national homeland, a beloved physical place with beloved cultural traditions, accents, habits, is pretty knotty.)

My Jewish exoticism is very new to me, but I find the New Yorkerness is natural and grows more visible and detailed to me outside NY; I only recently became aware that there has been a sort of displacement. My New Yorkerness - asked about my nationality or my ethnicity here, I always, unthinking, say 'New Yorker' not 'American' and not 'Jewish' - is obviously both a flight from Americanness and an adaptation of Jewishness, the form of Jewishness instilled in me, attached to an island concieved of as a kind of refuge, a little refugee colony, rather than a patria. I lay the credit or blame for that partly at Woody Allen's door.