Are Woody Allen's Films Really That Sexist?

The other day, I ran across an opinion piece on The Huffington Post about Woody Allen’s latest film, Café Society. The headline declares a destination: “How Woody Allen Still Gets Away With Writing Sexist Movies.” And the subhead plots a course: “Café Society is set in the ’30s to match the director’s retrograde views on women and love.”

This take on Woody Allen is nothing new, so at first I gave it little attention. But then I watched Magic in the Moonlight (2014) and saw in the two main characters an example of the views in question. Emma Stone plays Sophie, a poor American who claims to have clairvoyance. At first glance, she conforms to the pretty, young and dumb archetype. Colin Firth plays a rich Brit named Stanley, a famed debunker of charlatans. He’s older and believes he’s wiser, and at one point vows to take Sophie under his wing. Central to the film’s themes is the dichotomy between reason and magic, and here too the characters conform to stereotypes. Sophie is emotional and full of wonder at life, while Stanley sees everything in the stark light of reason.

 

Thus, Magic in the Moonlight would seem to support criticisms that Allen’s work is sexist, because, among other things, it employs outdated gender stereotypes. And if Magic in the Moonlight is sexist, then much of Allen’s work is sexist, because these themes, even analogues of these very characters, run throughout his work.

However, the kind of criticism that casually declares Allen’s work sexist is usually the kind that begins with a number of assumptions--about gender, sexism and Allen himself--and simply applies them to the work in question without listening to what the work says. This approach rules out, before interpretation has even begun, the chance of the critic hearing anything but an affirmation of preexisting convictions, such as those under which feminism tends to labor.

Feminist critique is certainly necessary and interesting--and it has the potential to be enlightening when applied to Allen’s oeuvre--but it all seems cut by the same cookie cutter these days, especially online. We all know, upon seeing the headlines, what we’re going to read and could tick off the main points without even reading them. At this point, the same old lines of attack are boring and obfuscate more than they disclose. There’s more to any work of art than any ideology will allow.

You could also try looking at Allen’s work this way: The typical Allenesque neurotic male is always the fool in the drama. Male rationality is not elevated to a virtue but rather ridiculed--and not just by supposed female irrationality. The men themselves are always shown to be confused romantics and the women to be shrewder, smarter and more capable. Allen purposely subverts the very stereotypes he employs. On the surface, the characters are one way, but just underneath they are another way, and this isn’t hard to see.

In Magic in the Moonlight, Stanley sneers at others’ fanciful notions and he mocks Sophie for being uneducated, but his overbearing rationality leaves him cold and empty, unable to see anything in a starry sky but a vast, menacing universe. His fear that his orderly world will fall apart blinds him to Sophie’s love for him and his love for her, leaving him a clown who is victim to his emotions. The voice of wisdom eventually comes through conversations with acquaintances, most notably Sophie and his aunt, who function like psychoanalysts by providing the “talking cure” that leads to self-realization.

 

Allen’s films do often speak an older language when it comes to the tug-of-war between the sexes, but that language was--and in the works of great artists and the lives of many regular people remains--often more egalitarian and sophisticated than our current polemical narratives regarding gender will admit. We shouldn’t abandon forward-thinking narratives for “retrograde” ones, but we do stand to learn from throwing more than one narrative at a work to see to what degree they all stick.

And we might try no ideology at all.

The dictates of ideology will only get us so far, but probably not very far. This is exactly Sophie’s--and Allen’s--point in Magic in the Moonlight: Thinking outside the constraints we impose on ourselves is liberating.

 

 

Previous post on Woody Allen:

Myths About Woody Allen's Oeuvre

 

Love & Ideology In A Town Like Alice

Once you realize that ideology is everywhere, it’s hard to miss. Entire armies of bloggers--myself included--never tire of commenting on its manifestations, especially in popular culture. Most recently, I found Nevil Shute’s novel A Town Like Alice (1950) to be bursting with ideology.

The central protagonist of A Town Like Alice is Jean Paget, an Englishwoman forced into a death march on Malaya during occupation by the Japanese army in World War II. During that time, she meets Australian prisoner of war Joe Harman, who suffers crucifixion by the Japanese but survives. After the war, they reconnect in Australia and romance blooms. It’s all very heart-warming, especially as told in Shute’s simple prose, but like all art, like all language, it contains hidden agendas.

 

One agenda in A Town Like Alice is that of capitalism. In post-War Britain, Jean inherits enough money that she needn’t ever work for a living again. Nonetheless, she uses her inheritance in the Australian outback to start a shoe factory and ice cream parlor, among other ventures. Her capital, her ownership of the means of production, make her the very definition of a capitalist. Shute never portrays her entrepreneurial activities in any way but positive--she provides employment, stimulates the economy and turns a mere hole in the road into a boomtown--but will her employees always feel blessed to be mere proles? Are the Aborigines in the area pleased to see settlers continue to flood the land, subjugate nature, and enforce different values?

Which leads to more ideology: the colonialist mindset. Colonization, always a nasty affair, was also nasty in Australia. The Aborigines in A Town Like Alice are referred to derogatorily, they can’t share certain facilities with whites, and they aren’t trusted. In addition to playing European savior to the rustic whites of the Australian outback, Jean Paget plays white savior, first to the Malays and then to Aborigines. Toward the end, as her efforts bear fruit, the novel fairly reeks of those colonialist values of improvement, civilization and religion that Joseph Conrad derided in Heart of Darkness and W.E.B. Du Bois excoriated in “The Souls of White Folk” in Darkwater (previous post).

The ideological element that is most obvious is what philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls--in In Defense of Lost Causes and elsewhere--the production of the couple (video). Matchmaking is an objective in nearly every work of fiction in modern times. Everything from music videos to literary novels culminates in lovers joining, and A Town Like Alice is, after all, a romance. Shute’s novel takes this agenda further, though. When Jean employs girls in her businesses, it encourages more ringers to hang around, resulting in a growing number of couples, marriages and babies. In A Town Like Alice, the production of the couple combines with capitalism to actually produce couples through the mechanisms of the free market!

I find that a bit disconcerting.

However, the colonialist mindset in A Town Like Alice is mitigated. The first half of the book shows English women learning to live like Malays under Japanese imperial rule, while the second half deals with settlers of European background in land once only populated by Aborigines. Shute may have designed this reversal of roles to be instructive, but of what? He tells stories, but preaches little.  To what extent was he subconsciously reflecting the prejudices of his cultural background, and to what extent was he offering a conscious critique of that cultural background?

The latter is entirely possible. Shute’s novels (I’ve also read On the Beach.) indicate a man who was in many ways supremely moral and forward-thinking. For example, A Town Like Alice has no shortage of men looking down on women, but the women always prove them wrong. Far from frivolous, Jean is sober, perseverant and intelligent--and not after the cheap manner of the sexy, spunky heroines so favored in popular culture today. Shute has clearly designed his novel to contradict the demeaning stereotypes men in his time had of women and often still do today.

But feminism is ideology, too.

A Town Like Alice tells an enjoyable story, but like all stories, there is more beneath the surface--a worldview or worldviews the work encourages, for better or worse.

 

Toward No Ideology

Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, I’ve been increasingly suspicious of capitalism, and one strain of my reading has been in revolutionary history and leftist strains of thought. Obviously this means engagement with Marxism, and I have developed some sympathy for many of its concerns. So when it comes to ideology, where does this leave me?

Unsatisfied with the dark side of American capitalism, skeptical that alternate forms of capitalism can make a significant change, wary of drastic solutions of an anarchist or communist bent, and still trying to figure out what socialism could mean in an American context, it leaves me a pragmatist seeking any improvement--even a tweak--that can be made at all, and a philosopher willing to keep thinking, to keep looking for a new big answer to social and economic injustices.

Concerned with ideology, I subscribe to none. Dissatisfied with current options, I seek another. There is no reason that the dichotomy drilled into us by the Cold War--no-holds-barred American-style capitalism versus Soviet-style totalitarian communism--should present the only two possible arrangements for society on a national, international or global scale.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite YouTube clips of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek--someone who appears frequently in this blog and who identifies as “some kind of a communist”--in which he says that in light of all the messes in the 20th Century that arose from attempts to implement big solutions, maybe it’s time that, instead of doing something, we sat back and thought for a while:

Sometimes it’s okay just to think and to leave the perfect, big solution for later. Meanwhile, however, smaller actions can be taken for more modest improvements. And in some places of the world, such as those touched by the Arab Spring, imperfect change may be substantial indeed.