{non-fiction}

There was an evening in high school when I saw Annie Hall. I drove to find someone who wasn’t there and told them in a shaky voice that I was going to be a filmmaker.

It displaced a dream that was already there, the way these things tend to happen with kids—not a transition so much as a sudden inversion of space-time. A bubble over a bubble.

These things we have, these loves, they tumble over us, and we wrap ourselves around them. A fissure breaks through the rock and the water runs down through us and over us. Maybe the water stops running sooner or later, but the inward shape of what passed, and for how long, remains.

We believe our first loves are definitive somehow, and they are, but it’s been my experience that we more or less can’t wait to put them behind us. It’s not long before we need what we’re missing too much, at the shallowest, or wonder why we ever loved them how we did, at the deepest. When the madness of desire passes, its sheer absurdity stays with us, like a screen saver in a postcoital void.

And yet somehow we’re never alone in our madnesses, in our loves. There may be no good reason why everyone loves the same girl in high school when she herself has at least two friends who are more interesting, or why bestselling books aren’t more meritocratically burned for kindling, or why there are a dozen soul singers whose names you don’t know who were better than Elvis. There may be reasons, but not good ones, and certainly not ones that would make us proud.

The fact is: the heart wants what it wants.
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​Woody Allen has marveled throughout his career at the waves of adulation that have greeted virtually everything he’s ever touched. From the beginning, it was as though people just wanted to like him. Audiences and critics both unfailingly de-emphasized his weaknesses and swooned over his strengths. Every Borscht belt witticism was hailed as a deep-cutting insight; every muttered charge of insubstantiality was instantly dismissed on the gut check. He just had us.

Although it’s been routinely eye-rolled away as more lovable neurosis, he has always been direct about the fact that the reception perplexes him. He thinks very little of his oeuvre, and has judged himself a failed artist. His reasons are straightforward. He’s never made a great film; nothing that could stand next to a Grand Illusion or a Citizen Kane. Worse, he’s barely even tried. In his own words, he doesn’t care enough about the work to miss his dinner reservations.

And yet the fact remains that people have loved him so dearly, so completely, and with such unflagging consistency that he is the only filmmaker in American history to have a standing arrangement with both his financiers and his audience to produce whatever movies he pleases as often as he pleases for as long as he pleases. Orson Welles actually did make Citizen Kane, and his life is roughly analogous to Allen’s goateed mirror universe shadow self.

Welles’ creative life barely survived The Magnificent Ambersons; Allen’s has survived twenty films past his own creative suicide.

And that wasn’t even the worst of it.
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​Cameras are so ubiquitous in our lives, their relation to us so direct, their effect so profound, that calling our world one dark room might as well be a cliché. We don’t just wield them; we inhabit them. We live in the space between.

For us, cameras are black mirrors; for Woody Allen, coming of age three quarters of a century ago, they were stained glass windows.

Churches had them—those only quasi-secular houses of worship called movie houses. Etched into them were movie stars. Not Twitter-hounded desperates spreading nutrition regimens, but gods. That’s what a camera was for: for when you needed a stained glass window.

Woody Allen was never seen as a radical by his peers; quite the opposite. To his contemporaries in the New Hollywood, who wanted to paint the glass themselves when they didn’t want to break it, Allen was a puzzlement. Reverential towards the old gods, smitten by the crystal black and white of American film, he was too much of an antiquarian even to seem old-fashioned. While the likes of Scorsese and Coppola bearded their way to the pyre, Allen seemed more like a fresh-faced teen marveling at how tall everything seemed in the castle.

And yet the contradiction is profound, because Allen managed a new turn none of the revolutionaries could have imagined—one that put him decades ahead of the curve, and even stretches his uniqueness into the horizon.

He invented YouTube.
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​Using a camera to document your life, to speak to, to confess to, to journal in, to pose, to create rapturous faux images of what you’d like your life to be like, is a generational event. It is profoundly familiar to anyone under a certain age. Even if you don’t do it yourself, you’re likely to be able to recognize the signs of it, the nuances of it, what is left out and why. It’s a more or less essential part of social education in the 21st century.

It’s hard to overstate the newness, the audacity, and the effect it had for someone to be doing this for the first time, with millions of dollars at his disposal, a crack team of professionals, and goddamn film stock. Remember that, kiddoes: every rainy day kiss, every overlapping-dialogue dinner with overeducated friends, every private musing about the Flaubert novel or Marx brothers movie that makes life worth living—all of it whirring to celluloid, spinning and searing at thousands of dollars a minute.

The scripts were loose, the situations as curated for glamor as an instagram feed. The concerns were private, the lives were personal. The level of discourses was unfailingly un-public. Allen’s characters didn’t care about Vietnam; they weren’t trying to change the world or even pay much attention to what was going on in it. If anything they were doing their best to block it out, either with romance or bird’s eye dismissals of earthly relevance. Just enough Kierkegaard for the kiss.

This wasn’t Lawrence of Arabia. It wasn’t Casablanca. It wasn’t neorealism. It was, and remains, le cinéma intime: a pulsing, present, feminine answer to the charging male energy of the form up to that point. It didn’t try to engage you, to thrill you, to amaze you. It existed as its own private world, and its desire seemed to be whole unto itself. And although this style has since become ubiquitous, Woody Allen’s example is the first and the purest varietal.

To be sure, the French have a celebrated tradition of private lives on film, and a sense of intimacy has been a cherished goal since the dawn of the art form. The difference is perspective: le cinéma intime reflects the state of mind and preoccupations, not only of its creator, but of its protagonist. The creator is itself part of the creation: a prism with its own shape. It is not necessarily more personal than any other film, but in the language of cocktails, it is more spirit-forward. You know who’s talking to you because they want you to know.

Many people engage in this kind of filmmaking today—professional and not. But the directness makes it a raw point of contact between the chosen and the unchosen. It’s why filmmakers such as Lena Dunham and Zach Braff incite such opprobrium. It gives the appearance of revealment while luxuriating in the privilege of a medium that is brutally class-segregated. You think they’re talking the way you’re talking, but they’re talking with music.

And music, as it turns out, was the only thing there ever really was.
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​I’ve been to New York twice. The first time was when I was a young child on a family vacation. I remember the trip mostly because it was when I fell flat on my face and broke my nose. The second time was much the same, only I didn’t break my nose.

I lived there for the better part of four years, right out of school—variously being poor, working at odd jobs and creative-adjacent internships, writing, and doing impressions of the economy. You should have seen my recession. It brought the house down.

I was also in love. I got married there. I knew what I wanted to do. I knew who I was. I didn’t become anybody, but I was somebody.

Not long after I finished writing a novel I walked the length of Manhattan in the rain. At one point I passed a movie theatre playing Annie Hall at midnight.

The screening was hours away, and I didn’t care to see it, but I remember wondering who would be going to that show. I tried to picture them. I thought about what they’d look like and how they’d feel, walking out of the theatre at close to two in the morning. It would have to be people who were going alone, wouldn’t it? It didn’t strike me as a romantic date. The theatre wouldn’t be full, or near full. It would have one seat occupied every other row or so, people being alone and listening to that song fade into the credits. And then they’d be out in the cold again.
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​Woody Allen’s daughter accuses him of sexual assault when she was a young child. He denies that the assault ever took place. What he certainly did do was marry his partner’s daughter. He alleges that the assault story was manufactured by this partner as a means of revenge. An official inquiry concluded that there was no criminal wrongdoing on Allen’s part.

What is to be done with this is the unanswerable question that must be answered. It’s the nausea that has spread over Allen’s work, past and future. And it’s not just him. It’s a broad phenomenon of the intimification of all cinema. The attention paid to the private lives of the people who make these most public of things, who they are, and why them, all seems to flow out of this same tributary. He is the godfather, and his sins must be reckoned with—or evaded, if we are to stick to the script and wait for the music.

Annie Hall isn’t a great film. I’m not sure if I even like it anymore. Even compared to the rest of his films, it was clear to me even as a teenager that it was a curiosity more than anything else. Its power was in its directness, not its artfulness. And that directness came mostly in the form of the cinema’s great secret: music.

Music is as whole an art form as we have. There is no more ubiquitous or thorough experience in the arts. A concert is as complete an experience as it could be: Wagner be damned; no one goes to the opera for the set design. A great song is as deep an experience as we are likely to have as an audience.

And yet the cinema pretends—successfully—to be its own art form, when it almost invariably draws its true power from art that was produced independently. The truth is that whatever you feel in the cinema, you feel because you have been convinced to sit in silence in front of a screen and pretend that you care about what you are seeing. The music slides into you like a scent, directly, evading your direct contemplation and shuttling straight into your heart. It is the greatest sleight of hand in the history of art: the entire medium is the distraction. Making a great film is working too hard.
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​And then there’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Mia Farrow plays a beaten woman. She is physically beaten by her husband. She is financially beaten by her husband and the Great Depression. She is beaten by the relentless demands of her work, by the hopelessness of her circumstances, by the romantic dreams she carries on her like a coat. But most of all she is beaten inside, by her own sense of herself. I’ll never forget the way she delivers the line ‘I’m nothing,’ when complimented. There’s no sadness, no self-pity. I’ve said that before in my life, but I’ve never said it the way she does. There’s no judgment to it, no cruelty; there’s even some sweetness to it, the way there is in her voice all the time. It’s like she’s saying it’s cloudy out.

She meets a movie star; a god. And he’s not even the most extraordinary person she meets. That would be the man who steps out of the movie screen to be with her.

To me, it’s Allen’s urtext. Everything is there, and for once, it’s not schematic and dashed off. The humor is there. The melancholy. The disappointment. The longing. The movies. The carousel.

Not incidentally, it’s one of his only films for which a score was composed. When the lovers end up in an abandoned amusement park, as so many of Allen’s lovers do, there’s an aching piano line called ‘Carousel Memories’. I play it all the time. It makes me think of my favorite moment in the movies, when the fictional man kisses her, and she says ‘You kiss perfectly—just like how I dreamed kissing would be like,’ which, to me, is the closest any man has ever come to writing a line that sounds like what it actually feels like to be a woman. The longing, the aching. The knowing.

He wonders where the fade-out is. There’s supposed to be a fade out when you kiss, he says, and then...and then you’re making love in some private, secret place. She says it doesn’t work like that in the real world. ‘But when you kissed me it felt like my heart faded out. And I closed my eyes and I was in some private, secret place.’

​This was the character who would be left tear-stained and alone in a movie theater, and the woman who he would charge with lying about the sexual assault of her child to get even with him. Le cinéma intime est la vie intime.

​Maybe The Purple Rose of Cairo is a great film. At least it’s the closest he ever came. Either way, it means a lot to me. That’s how this kind of thing works. It goes straight past you, so that you’re loving first, and you don’t know why, or whether you even should. Maybe that’s what he means by being a failed artist. It’s not exactly art.

Allen zealously maintains that his work has stayed unaffected by the scandal of his private life. He points especially to the fact that his output never slowed. As the cinema fell, guerilla by guerilla, to the computer-created legions of supervillains and their propagandists, Allen did somehow produce film after film, year after year, each one with some kind of release and some kind of reception. Only now, with the gathering force of the #MeToo movement, has the progress halted, with more or less widespread repudiation and the burying of his latest film. It’s probably worth noting here that the man himself is eighty-three years old.

It’s also worth noting that his creative life ended decades ago. The films he has made are, without exception—truly, without exception, the occasional maddened and maddening critical notices aside—the products of a man who has given up.

In the aftermath of his private life’s scandals, there was a downward spiral that featured some raw, interesting work of alternating inquiry and fantasy. There was passion in this, joy, and even—shockingly for an Allen film—unvarnished anger. Deconstructing Harry is one of the angriest films ever made, and in the context of le cinéma intime, nakedly bracing. It’s many things: hilarious and hateful and worthy of scorn—but it’s not bad. The last film he made that was good was his suicide note.

It’s about music.
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​Sean Penn plays the greatest jazz guitarist in the world—well, second greatest, behind Django Reinhardt. He swaggers through his life, celebrated wherever he goes, his public confidence masking the profound hopelessness he feels at not actually being great. At his most human, he listens to Django and cries. Sweet and lowdown.

His great love—and you couldn’t make this up, unless you were him—is a woman who can’t talk. She’s better than him. He ruins it.

In the climax of the film he takes his guitar and smashes it to pieces.

‘I made a mistake,’ he says, over and over again. ‘Okay? I made a mistake.’

I don’t know who Woody Allen is. I don’t know what he’s done, or what he hasn’t done. I don’t know if he ever made a great film. But once, in the rain, I missed the music at midnight, and part of me always will.

​1/22/2019