In Which Whatever Woody Says Must Be True

Looking Glass

by GEORGIA HARDSTARK

As a child, when picturing myself as an adult, my imaginary life very closely resembled a Woody Allen film. Much like the beginning scene of Hannah and Her Sisters, a large part of my imaginary adulthood took place at a party. Glasses of wine clasped in one hand, the other hand gesturing wildly as I would surely be caught up in some argument or heated discussion, I would flit from room to room to check on guests, make sure the maid had enough petite food to pass around on shiny silver trays, all the while bitching about my mother. Boobs would be involved, too, as I would surely have grown them by then...large ones, actually, I assured my young and flat-chested self.

I look at my life now, and can’t help but think it was a detriment to my future that I was allowed, even encouraged, to watch Woody Allen movies as a child. "This is what Jews are like," I thought. “This is what adults are like."

If you’re one of my ex-boyfriends who had the opportunity to accompany me to one of my many family get-togethers (Hanukkah at my grandma’s house being the most hectic), you’d have seen that there was no reason for me not to think that Woody Allen movies might actually be documentaries, and not, in fact, fictional.

There is SO much going on. A drama in every conversation, a glass of wine in every hand, a complaint about one’s mother uttered at least hourly. The only one of my childhood fantasies that didn’t evolve into reality was the mammary-centric one (really, the most important one), as my breasts seemed to think that wine and hors d'oeuvres were enough to keep me happy as an adult.

Since many aspects of my life do resemble a Woody Allen film now, I couldn’t help but wonder which sister I most resembled, as I watched Hannah and Her Sisters last week. I was nothing like Mia Farrow’s character, the titular oldest sister, Hannah, I assured myself. Although the backbone of the family, the most stable and the one everyone seemed to rely and depend on much to her seeming comfort, I saw her as a pushover and much too trusting. That isn’t me...plus I have better hair. Probably to my detriment, I’m hypersensitive to other people’s intentions. Sure, I’d love a sister like Hannah, but aside from the fact that I find a young Michael Caine (playing Hannah’s husband) to be one sexy bitch, she and I have nothing in common.

Holly, played by the lovely Dianne Wiest, now she is the sister that scared me the most, because in the beginning of the movie I recognized more and more similarities between her character and myself. But by the middle of the movie, when she was berating Hannah after asking for yet another loan, taking bumps of cocaine during dates with small, balding Jewish men (SO not my type), and letting herself be walked on by domineering friends, I assured myself that this was not the sister I resembled.

This leaves us with Lee, the youngest of the sisters, played by Barbara Hershey. I am, indeed, the youngest of my siblings, so that’s an easy correlation to make. While I would never, not in a million years, have an affair with any married man let alone one that was married to my sister, Lee also found Michael Caine to be one sexy bitch, so there’s that correlation again. But that was just about where the similarities ended.

Aside from an affinity towards older bearded men and used bookstores, I was left once again to scramble to make connections with these fictional women, but I kept coming up short.

Once the movie was over, after everyone ended up happy and married and right back at a wine and hors d'oeuvres infested soiree, I realized that perhaps it was time for me to reevaluate my ideal adulthood fantasy, and to pick a new director to orchestrate my future. I’ve been holding on to this idea that I’m some quirky, neurotic Mia Farrow/Diane Keaton hybrid with better hair when in actuality, I’m less neurotic than inquisitive and bold, plus I look terrible in hats and becoming pregnant with Satan’s spawn is unlikely because I’m on the pill.

So Hannah can have her nitpicky life and her troubled sisters, as I’ve decided to mirror my adulthood daydreams after Spaghetti Westerns. At least this way I can prop my nonexistent boobs up with a corset instead of hiding them under a blazer and oversized tie.

Georgia Hardstark is the contributing editor to This Recording. She tumbls here, and blogs it all here. She last wrote in these pages about making up her mind.

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In Which We Are Wise Beyond Our Years

Those Radio Days

by BEN ARFMANN

Does anyone else get annoyed when the 45-and-older crowd talks about their prepubescent days? I do. Sometimes you get lucky and meet a crazy old guy with stories about the time he set fire to the Elks’ Lodge, but mostly you get generic Our Gang re-runs: "I threw firecrackers at the neighbor’s dog, Fluffy." "I stole biscuits from Mrs. Joseph’s window." "I blah blah blah cutesy story blah blah." Come on. Really? Whenever I hear one of these, I want to grab the middle-aged storyteller by the shoulders and yell: “No! I do not accept these anecdotes! Your childhood does not accept them!”

No one’s childhood was actually Leave It To Beaver. I’m already twenty-five, but somehow I can still remember, un-prompted, that years 5 through 10 of my life were spent variously in extreme states of fear, confusion and stupidity.

A lot of the time, it was intolerable to be around me. I was a jerk-ish, weird little kid with jerk-ish, weird little concerns. I did stupid things, and a lot of them weren’t very nice. Once I filled up a water gun with my own urine and sprayed the neighbor girls while they sunbathed. Another time I called my best friend Jesse a “stupid Jew” until he cried and hid in my closet. I was kind of a shit as a kid, and from what I remember, most other kids were shits too.

That’s what childhood was like: we were all jerks. And pretty damn cruel, too. That’s what made childhood interesting. And funny. But the movies, produced out in la-la-land like they are, don’t seem to get that. Most movies about kids are either neon-colored schlock or god awful i-wanna-die-I’m-so-depressed awards festival groupies. Examples of the first — Hotel for Dogs and The Sandlot — conform to your un-married uncle’s ideas about childhood: "Oh those little ragamuffins, just out for trouble, aren’t they?" They impose logic and rational motivations on top of generic, sugarplum characterizations. On the other end you’ve got all the true-life, scared-straight artfilm pictures — George Washington, Ratcatcher — which are, at best, poignant and “true;” which means they’re nostalgia trips for people "too smart" for nostalgia. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone made a picture about kids that was honest? A film that enjoyed watching kids not in a creepy way, or in a stupid, corporate way, but in a simple "little kids are strange and bizarre and fucking awesome" way?

Make a list of the directors you might hire for that job. Maybe Jean Renoir directing a Tom Green script? Alex Cox filming Roald Dahl? Good choices, all. I would submit also (maybe, just maybe): Woody Allen circa 1973. If the guy who directed Bananas and Sleeper were to pull a Tiger Lily on Stand By Me, that might actually be something. Woody used to be Hollywood’s vulgar, vital court jester.

I came at the film hoping for a manic, ruthless comedy about the real stuff — the cruel, terrible, clinically insane stuff - of childhood. A “classic.” That hope was irresponsible. This movie was released in 1987 — well into Woody’s “no really, I’m a WASP” phase. It received a four star review from both Roger Ebert and from my Gram. I love Roger (I love my Gram more) but the man has got a pudding-pop heart and a badly misguided memory. Playground trauma must have struck Roger early and struck him hard; looking like he does today, I can only imagine what sort of Goof Troop reject seven-year-old Ebert was back then. Maybe he blocked out all those painful memories of childhood torment, and now honestly thinks grade school was all about rosy cheeks and prime-time mischief. Well, fine.

Radio Days is not morally offensive, but it is safe and cute and lacking in nutsack. Bananas-era Woody would have cried. Radio Days is a limping collection of childhood anecdotes (set during the Second World War), loosely structured around the idea that "radio, man, that was a real mass medium." These are the venture-nothing-gain-nothing stories that your parents might break out at a co-worker’s anniversary celebration, or while carpooling with a tennis buddy.

Example: Woody’s parents, when introduced in the movie, enter the narrative while bickering fiercely. "I had never met a couple that argued as much as they did,” claims disembodied Woody. What did they argue about? Which ocean is better: the Atlantic or the Pacific. There’s some other stuff in the movie — some limp-wristed jokes about how “radio voices never match the face!” and Mia Farrow doing a dialect bit — but most of it is lamed and embarrassing. This was the movie that Allen shot between two more serious attempts at the plate — Hannah and September — and everything about it screams “bunt.” His voice over, which blankets the film, is flat minded; the sets get more attention than the dialog; and when Larry David shows up for two lines in the second act, Allen doesn’t even have sense enough to play his mug for the close-up comedy it’s capable of. For shame, Alvy, For Shame.

Behind my reaction to Radio Days is pouty little-boy disappointment. I wanted it to be a vulgar trip through America’s shared small times. But it’s not. It’s inert and grinning, the product of an artist who found out too soon that “people really like me!” and decided that was all he really wanted, anyways.

Ben Arfmann is a contributor to This Recording. He tumbls here.

"I Don't Have Any More Love Songs" - Merle Haggard (mp3)

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In Which We Refuse To Play Ourselves

Where He Lives

by JULIE KLAUSNER

There’s this game, Find the Filmmaker, where I decide from the characters in a movie which one of them best represents the point of view of the person who wrote it. Unless, of course, it’s a Nora Ephron movie, and then I have to play Find the Remote, so I can turn the channel to Cake Boss before Meg Ryan hates her neck. He’s the Cake Boss!

In Broadcast News, I figured James L. Brooks was half-Holly Hunter and half-Albert Brooks, because he’s smart enough to hate himself, but can only do so in the form of a tiny Brunette who looks like a ninja when she wears polka dots.

It’s easy to play Find the Filmmaker in an Apatow film: you just split Paul Rudd’s Awkward with the guy who’s making you LOL. And with Kevin Smith, it’s not even a game, because all of his characters congeal into one many-mouthed monster with his voice. How funny that he casts himself in his movies as the "silent" one! Kadooze, Mr. Smith!

But it’s trickier than you’d think to find Woody Allen in his films, because sometimes he’s not playing him. And I’m not talking about that minstrel show, Celebrity, starring Kenneth Branagh in Jewface.

Celebrity

I mean in Hannah and Her Sisters. You’re so distracted by Allen’s character, Mickey, with his hypochondria and suicidal tendencies and cartoonishly Jewish family and his comedy writing job, that you forget to look elsewhere for Woody. Because there are deeper strains of him marbled into the flesh of the more dangerous narcissists in Hannah, starting with Michael Caine’s character, Elliot.

When we first meet Elliot, we learn from his earnest voiceover about his debilitating crush on his wife’s sister. He’s married to Mia Farrow’s Hannah, but ends up cheating on her with Barbara Hershey’s Lee; the one who competes with the rain for having the smallest hands. Elliot feels bad about acting on his urges, but he still does what he likes, and manages to compliment his huge brain in the process. “For all my education, accomplishments, and so-called wisdom,” he muses to the world’s most underpaid psychoanalyst, “ I can’t fathom my own heart.”

Elliot is the worst. His villainy is so odious, it earned Caine an Oscar five years before Hopkins won for his Hannibal Lecter. When Elliot yells at Hannah, fresh from being wounded by her sister’s rejection of him, and tells her it's "hard to be around someone who gives so much and needs so little in return," it is heartbreaking to watch, in the shadow of Allen’s and Farrow’s real life break-up.

Because the cruelty of using poor, fabulous Michael Caine to say what you can’t, in public, to your partner once she is out of character, exceeds the terrain of narcissism and bleeds into some kind of gruesome art. Making this movie to talk to Mia about her adoption hobby, her selflessness, and her general wishy-washiness was a poisonous simulacrum—like talking through one of your Barbies during playtime with your sister. And nobody should learn they’re adopted from Skipper.

In one scene, after excusing her and Woody’s actual children, Moses and Satchel, from the dinner table, Mia, as Hannah, turns to a brooding Elliot. She’s dressed in a tie and a vest, with rolled-up shirt sleeves, like a grown-up Annie Hall, but good for more than just the eggs. And when Hannah asks Elliot if he loves somebody else, he snaps her head off.

“Supposing I said ‘yes.’ ‘I am disenchanted. I am in love in love with someone else,’” he baits. People who do despicable acts enjoy tempting the boundaries of their wrongdoing and its consequence. It’s why serial killers go back to their crime scenes—it’s not just for voyeuristic thrills or Wicca rites.

“Are you?” Hannah asks. And then, the longest pause since The Countess took a drink of water before telling that poor black girl she was too fat to be a model.

"No!"

Woody doesn’t just live in that pause, in Elliot’s cognizance of his bad choice to lie. He’s in Frederick, Lee’s older artiste beau, who protests "I don’t sell my work by the yard" when rock star Daniel Stern shops his studio for a painting that matches his ottoman. He’s in Mickey’s father, who shuts down his son’s neurotic philosophizing: “How the hell do I know why there were Nazi’s. I don’t know how the can opener works." And he is in Hannah’s father, the patriarch holding court with grace at the piano, who tolerates his diva wife’s occasional hysterics.

But maybe most of all, Woody is in Dianne Wiest’s Holly—his character’s adversary-cum-soul mate. The one who wandered professional callings the way Mickey traversed religions; the girl who got passed over for Carrie Fisher by an architect who liked opera; the downtown crackerjack who could pull off a sailor shirt and a beret and still manage to look fuckable. And the one whose observations are at once, the most self-deprecating and astute. Holly ends up being a screenwriter—and a great one.

And Holly is the one Hannah eviscerates. Poor Hannah never got to dig her talons into Elliot, the man who cheated on her, nor Lee, the sister who betrayed her. Instead, Hannah attacks Holly once she finds out she’s been written about in one of her scripts.

"People always look for clues [about me] in my movies. . . no matter how many times I’ve told them over the years I make this stuff up,” Woody Allen told NPR this month. But whatever he believes out loud in the company of Terry Gross doesn’t exonerate Allen from using himself in his own work, or writing about people he loves in a way that’s so revealing it can actually hurt. "I’m real upset about what you wrote," Hannah tells Holly, who’s done nothing but successfully test her patience until that moment. And Holly, defending herself, responds like anyone who makes art from of what they know to be true about people they love: "It’s a made up story!"

Julie Klausner is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer and comedian living in New York. She blogs here, tumbls here, and you can buy her new book here.

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