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.
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.
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.
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