Gaywatch: Whatever Works

Watching the trailer for Woody Allen’s latest Midnight in Paris, it looks to be a familiar blend of jittery existentialism, piss-taking of pseudo-intellectuals and fantasy getting in the way of reality (or maybe the other way round). His more recent films have been watered down versions of the glory years, of course, a reasonably inevitable feature of an artist past his creative peak. But there’s still always something to love, a continuation of the themes and preoccupations that have defined his gigantic oeuvre.

I especially like the way Woody riffs on identity and its interchangeability. Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters has a breakdown after a visit to the doctor’s reveals a possible brain tumour. To his Jewish parent’s chagrin –his mother locks herself in the bathroom in tears – Mickey decides to convert first to Catholicism and then to the Hare Krishnas. Skip forward to Woody’s 2009 film Whatever Works and Patricia Clarkson’s character Marietta is a God freak housewife from the south who magically turns into a sexually experimental hippie after spending a few weeks in New York. Her husband John, also a fairly fundamentalist Christian, randomly talks to a homosexual man in a bar and by the end of the scene is a convert to the gay religion. Jump back to early directorial feature Bananas and Woody is playing a young man who pretends to be interested in political activism to impress a girl and somehow winds up president of fictional South American country San Marcos. When he returns to the US in disguise, he switches between his two personas with the aid of a ludicrously flimsy fake beard.

Woody’s work has always seemed deeply rooted in his Jewishness. Skepticism constantly battles with a deeper philosophical bond between Woody and the religion he complains was shoved down his throat as a child. His movies are masterful in recreating this impasse in alternating comic and tragic tones. In Sleeper, Woody’s Miles Munroe is transported 200 years into the future after being cryogenically frozen and is served by a pair of bickering, neurotic Jewish robots at ‘Ginsberg & Cohen Computerized Fittings’. More somberly, Crimes and Misdemeanors’ Judah is plagued by flashbacks to childhood lessons in theistic morality after arranging for his unstable mistress to be murdered.

I like that Woody’s obsession replays itself across the gamut of identity politics but occasionally his depiction of queer characters gets on my nerves. There’s the scene in Annie Hall where Alvy Singer insults people from a park bench and makes a comment about two swishing queens. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson’s characters getting it on grates as male-orchestrated fantasy. I can admit this does potentially start to border on paranoia worthy of the great man himself. I remember watching the scene in Play It Again, Sam in which Woody stalks an art gallery with Diane Keaton in a desperate attempt to meet women. He informs her that his favourite painter is Van Gogh because “he cut off his ear for a girl that he loved” and I had a moment of gay-induced outrage based on the unproven conviction that the Dutch artist cut it off due to his unrequited love for Gauguin rather than for a woman. Alvy Singer would appreciate this. Walking down the street with his maniacal gait, he’s complaining about anti-semitism to a friend. Alvy has been having lunch with some TV executives. “So I said, did you eat yet? And Tom Christie said, ‘No, Jew?’...Not ‘did you eat‘ but ‘Jew eat’, you get it? He said ‘Jew’.”

Play It Again, Sam (Herbert Ross, 1972) — was van Gogh gaga for a girl or Gauguin?

Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) – Jew eat?