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Reconstructing Zelig: Identity Politics, Woody Allen, and the Rise of Celebrity Verite

Abstract: Reality television has so thoroughly suffused American broadcast and cable in 2011 that one might struggle to remember a time when cinema verite was gospel for documentary filmmaking, and American television had yet to stage Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire (Fox, 2000).  With the rise in popularity for reality programming, much of that attention has focused on how emergent celebrities, playing themselves, get to perform plot lines hybridized from both situation comedy and sports tourneys.  Yet another aspect of reality programming has characterized the genre, and that has received somewhat less attention: celebrities who already have achieved some notoriety and who also play themselves, but whose identities rather than celebrity emerge from this depiction.

Given its preoccupation with both cinematic alter-egos and the authentic auteur, the arc of Allen's work arguably anticipated the trend of what this paper calls "celebrity verite."  One could even look to Allen's first film as director, screenwriter, and actor - Take the Money and Run (Cinerama, 1969) - as a portent, mixing documentary and fiction in ways that preceded the assimilation of these techniques into the mockumentary.  The blur between Allen's alter-ego and his auteurist persona was fully realized by the time of Zelig (Orion, 1983), a fictional documentary about a chameleon-like figure who himself becomes a celebrity.

Although directed by renowned documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple and not Allen, Wild Man Blues seems particularly noteworthy in how it negotiates Allen's celebrity and identity at a particular moment in time, before the emergence of reality programming in the U.S.; following the highly publicized breakup between Allen and Mia Farrow as well as the highly controversial marriage to their adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn; and amid the release of two of Allen's most potent explorations of celebrity after the Farrow debacle, Deconstructing Harry (Fine Line, 1997) and the appropriately titled Celebrity (Miramax).  Playing cinema verite straight, Wild Man Blues explores the straits of identity politics that intersect through Allen's celebrity, his ethnicity, sexuality, and a mash-up of familial relations.  As such, the documentary not only navigates the controversy concerning Allen's blurred public an private personas, and thus demands a reading alongside Deconstructing Harry and Celebrity.  It also predicts the emergence of identity politics and celebrity verite in American television, prefiguring similar themes in more recent shows such as NBC's Who Do You Think You Are and A&E's Family Jewels.

In a recent review of a PBS American Master's (2011) documentary on Woody Allen, television critic Eric Gould astutely recalled Allen's 1997 Deconstructing Harry (Fine Line), in which Allen himself played a writer using characters and situations around him as the basis for his novels.  When a fictitious interviewer asked writer Harry Block if his characters are meant to resemble himself, Block responds, "It's me, thinly disguised as the character.  In fact, I don't even think I should disguise it any more.  It's me" (qtd. in Gould).  If a viewer could take this fictitious exchange at factual face-value, understanding Allen's personal life, his public persona, and his films would invite a simple and pat reconciliation among them.  Allen, however, has made a career of noncommittally allowing various facets of personal biography, perhaps his own, to filter through in the form of jokes, writing, films, and interviews, all without confession or allegiance to any of them.  Despite Allen's famed capacity to "compartmentalize" his personal life from his professional one, as a parade of observers mused in the PBS documentary, the fictions that result from his professional output occur with a greater degree of disorder.  There, his personal life, public persona, and his films intertwine into a mise-en-abîme, where art can neither confirm nor deny that it is imitating life.  As Eric Gould observed, the moment from Deconstructing Harry plays like "a meta-Russian Doll routine" where "the audience is the rube," and where Allen "keeps his audience guessing" so that he can continue "to explore himself in film, or not, without ever having to admit it, or directly discuss it" (Gould).

Allen's work frequently deploys a documentary style, among many, to "keep his audience guessing," especially as to how far these films go as an exploration of the auteur self.  Yet at least as important as the pseudodocumentary style of the films he written and directed, Allen also has appeared as the central subject of two conventional documentaries about him and his work.  Both of these documentaries followed the highly publicized and controversial breakup between Allen and long-time partner and collaborator Mia Farrow, and Allen's subsequent relationship and marriage to their adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.   Many have looked to Allen's own films since the Soon-Yi crisis as an exploration of himself, of his celebrity, and of a set of fractured identity politics playing out amid a well-publicized scandal.  Like Allen's own films, both Wild Man Blues (Fine Line, 1997) and the 2011 PBS documentary similarly promise insight into his personal life post-Soon-Yi.  Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of these two very different documentaries is how little insight they offer into the scandal, instead accreting additional layers of meaning and disguise atop Allen's own body of work.

The failure to address the scandal does not translate into a failure of either film as documentary.  Rather, both films perform quite successfully what is now a well-recognized hybrid formula, celebrity verité.  Since Wild Man Blues, celebrity verité has emerged as a discernable form of television reality programming with such shows as Celebrity Apprentice (NBC) or Celebrity Wife Swap (ABC).  Like what these television programs do, celebrity verité's rendering of Allen helps humanize him and even rehabilitate a tarnished public image.   Because they engage scandal and a fractured set of identity politics, yet do so allusively, the Allen documentaries reveal the important function celebrity verité negotiates in mediating a public crisis while working to repair the cultural ruptures and rifts that occur as a result of crisis.

Celebrity verité neither emerged out of thin air, nor does it achieve some kind of special significance within either of the Allen films.  The form draws from the conventions of cinema verité, which as Michael Rothberg observes, paradoxically involves "deliberate and provocative staging of scenes" to arouse authentic "historical imperatives of its moment" (1235).  Rothberg's article considers the way in which filmmakers Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in 1961 drew upon the radical documentary experiments of Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov of the 1920s and 30s for the documentary Chronicle of a Summer.  That 1961 film staged remarkable encounters between its subjects, particularly at one point between a Holocaust survivor and African refugees from French colonial violence.  While Rouch and Morin's influential experiment sought to portray life as it was among everyday participants, it did not do so passively.

While neither Wild Man Blues nor the PBS documentary occur without their own provocations, both films likely owe more to the Americanized iteration of cinema verité.  Unlike Chronicle of a Summer, films like D. A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (1967) take on a much more journalistic mode in depicting events as they unfold, in that case, a 1965 European tour that proved increasingly frustrating for musician Bob Dylan.  Although people frequently attribute the phrase "fly on the wall" to Richard Leacock as a proponent of direct or observational cinema, most proponents of American cinema verité distance themselves from a completely passive role.  At a recent Directors Guild of America panel, filmmaker Albert Maysles noted that "a fly on the wall is a fly in the ointment."  Barbara Kopple, director of Wild Man Blues, added that "I am not a fly on the wall, but I am also not an elephant in the room" (qtd. in McCracken).

Pointing to the blurred line between art and life nothing new.  Godard quote about documentaries being fantasy and fiction being documentaries.  And while others have explored the importance of celebrity, scandal, Allen's ethnicity, no one has considered how documentary can help negotiate the meaning and importance of these things for audiences, or how audiences can use documentary as a point from which to speak and interpret these meanings.

Allen's own work persistently plays with the line between celebrity image and documentary ethic, beginning with Take the Money and Run.

Allen's work frequently explores the limits of the documentary form, either as an extradiegetic mode, as in Zelig; or as diegetic practice, as in Crimes and MIsdemeanors.

While scholarship has addressed the importance of the documentary mode in Allen's work, the role of documentary as a mode of reception for both Allen and his work remains less well understood.

Two documentaries about Woody Allen, Wild Man Blues and the PBS American Masters documentary, use the cinema verité mode of address to negotiate two of the more nettlesome aspects of Allen's public persona: the scandal involving his step-daughter Soon-Yi Previn, and Allen's Jewish ethnicity.

Wild Man Blues is notable both as the first documentary on Allen since the scandal involving his longtime partner Mia Farrow and their adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn; as well as how the film intertwines, albeit allusively, its identity politics with the politics of scandal.

Critical reception of both of these documentaries played a key role in determining how well both of these films addressed both the scandal as well as Allen's Jewishness.

Works Cited

Gould, Eric.  "The Many Faces of Woody Allen."  http://www.tvworthwatching.com/post/The-Many-Faces-of-Woody-Allen.aspx.  18 Nov. 2011.  Accessed 24 May 2012.

McCracken, Kristin.  "DGA: the Documentarian as Game-Changer."  16 May 2011.  http://www.tribecafilm.com.  Accessed 10 June 2012.

Rothberg, Michael.  The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: Chronicle of a Summer, Cinema Verité, and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor.  PMLA 119.5 (2004): 1231-46.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486119.  Accessed 10 June 2012.

Reconstructing "Wildman" Woody: Reconfiguring Identity, Ethnicity and the Incest Taboo

by Steven Alan Carr

Assistant Professor of Communication

Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne

Background

In 1993, Woody Allen and his estranged companion Mia Farrow began a series of highly publicized clashes over the custody of their children.  The hearings revealed that while involved with Farrow, Allen had consummated a sexual relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow's 21 year-old adopted daughter.  Publicity surrounding the hearings and subsequent revelations concerning the breach of the incest taboo generated a crisis in culture.  This crisis challenged accepted norms of identity, ethnicity and domesticity.  "If there were any doubts remaining," People Magazine observes, "the proceedings last week in a dingy courtroom in lower Manhattan confirmed that money, talent and fame -- not to mention lots of pets, kids and psychotherapy -- do not necessarily a happy home make" (1993).

Statement of the Problem

Crisis of the Family

But the Allen-Previn-Farrow imbroglio proved troubling in a number of other ways, pointing to deep fissures within ostensible cultural consent.  In addition to breaching the incest taboo, Allen and Previn's relationship transgressed the less visceral but nonetheless historically significant taboo against miscagenation.  Not having married, Allen and Farrow's relationship did not fit within conventional norms.  A family whose members included biological and adopted children from extant and prior marriages challenged common conceptions of the nuclear unit.  A number of press accounts even took Farrow to task for allowing Allen to enter her life under these conditions in the first place.

Crisis in Authorship

Allen's own identity could prove troubling as well.  For more than 30 years, popular and academic critics have hailed Allen as an auteur.  Films such as Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979) and the Bergmanesque Interiors (1978) encourage readings that reflect seemingly deep, personal meaning.  Many times, the personae of these films challenge accepted norms regarding American Jewish identity and sexual politics.  However disconcerting, though, a miasma of disbelief could hold in stasis the blur between Allen's fictive, public persona and his factual, private one.  Revelations of Allen's sexual relationship with Soon-Yi Previn shattered this stasis, rupturing Allen's personal and professional reputation.  Because Allen's professional work demands appreciation on a personal level, how could one tolerate an artist's personal and private transgression, especially as socially abhorrent a transgression as incest?

Reconstruction of Allen’s Authorship

In 1997 and 1998, two films featuring Allen attempted to manage, repair and reconstruct his image.  In the documentary Wild Man Blues, director Barbara Kopple employs cinema verite strategies to construct an insider’s view of the relationship between Previn and Allen.  The narrative feature Deconstructing Harry – written, directed and starring Allen – employs a series of formal strategies that appear to fragment and distance Allen’s thinly veiled characters.  Most notably, the latter film toys with diegetic and extra-diegetic narrative conventions.  Differentiated by genre, both films appropriate – in sometimes paradoxical fashion – a particular set of codes that at once challenge and reproduce a coherent way of looking.

Thesis

Furthermore, these films reinforce a way of looking at Allen that ultimately asserts his identity as an author. In both films, Allen’s relationship with Soon Yi serves as a reference point from which to reconstruct, repair and maintain the modernist notion of a discrete, coherent masculine identity.  While mainstream narrative and to a certain extent documentary form already reproduce notions of individual identity and autonomy, both Deconstructing Harry and Wildman Blues remain unique in how the challenge this relationship poses can justify and inspires a particular set of stylistic and narrative strategies.  Deconstructing Harry uses a variety of distanciation techniques - flash cuts, hand-held camera, "re-enactments" - whose artifice at times lends documentary-like credibility to a fictional tale.  Wild Man Blues, through its documentary form, resonates with such familiar narrative tropes as the tortured artist, the May-December married couple and at the end of the film, the Prodigal Son rejected and misunderstood by his parents.  Differentiated through genre, both films ultimately reproduce Allen as author.  Yet each film uses crises in subjectivity – either through distanciation techniques or  references to the relationship between Allen and Previn – as a way to assert this authorship.

Discursive Strategies

The diverse strategies upon which both Wild Man Blues and Deconstructing Harry rely have a particular historical context.  First popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Cinema Verite capitalized upon technological advances in lightweight, portable equipment, faster film stock and synchronized sound.  No longer bound to a studio or requiring lengthy set-ups on location, one could easily transport a mobile camera on location with relative ease.  Achieving currency in France, the notion of “true cinema” migrated to the United States, where it gained a distinct American inflection.  Some filmmakers like Ricky Leacock advocated the view that the documentary film camera could function like “a fly on the wall.”  Spending weeks or even months with subjects, the camera crew worked to achieve a certain invisibility.  In theory, once the crew could escape notice, the depiction of the subject or subjects would approach a certain truth and personal insight that other forms of expression could not.

Deconstruction and Postmodernism

In marked contrast to Cinema Verite, deconstructionism does not assume the existence of a single, discoverable truth.  Rather, its paradigm emphasizes the importance of competing truths, fragmented consciousness and the constructed nature of reality.  While postmodernism generally refers to the fragmentation of reality and consciousness, deconstruction as an approach has attempted to delineate the role of consciousness, language and ideology in helping to shape, repair and maintain this reality.  Obviously, both approaches retain much deeper and more distinct attributes.  However, their shared challenge to modernist assumptions of coherency, authorship and truth has created an interesting paradox.  For example, while much popular discussion decries the “political correctness” of acknowledging multiple truths, the same discussion deploys a descriptive postmodernism to lament a perceived cultural condition.

Of course, Allen is not the first to appropriate the Cinema Verite form or invoke the discourse of deconstruction in an antithetical way.  So-called reality shows have taken a form that once served directors like Frederic Wiseman so well in challenging the abuses of social institutions, and in shows like Cops, focused the lens from the institution onto the seeming abuses of individuals at the social margins.  The relationship between Allen and Previn make Wild Man Blues and Deconstructing Harry unique in their respective appropriations.  The much-publicized break-up between Farrow and Allen proved so troubling to so many because it signaled a kind of cultural breakdown of at least one of the following established social norms: incest, miscagenation, reconstituted families, domestic partnership instead of marriage vows.  In its most descriptive incarnation, popular discourse deployed the postmodern condition to narrate the Allen-Farrow crisis, using to represent what it perceived to be a more general breakdown of the American family.  At the same time, this discourse invokes a much more conventional set of gender stereotypes.  For example, press reports describing Allen and Farrow’s domestic arrangement blamed Farrow for “allowing this to happen,” thus propelling a whole set of expectations concerning female responsibility for family well-being.

Thus, popular discourse had already proceeded to perform its own conservative maintenance and repair of the crisis before Allen’s films first appeared.  While Allen decries celebrity-making and media in Wildman Blues, Deconstructing Harry and the most recent Celebrity, his own appropriation of the postmodernist condition and documentary form ultimately assert a modernist sensibility.  Furthermore, this sensibility remains highly consistent with the popular discourse on he condemns.  These films challenge viewers, whether showing the intimacy of his relationship through Cinema Verite or using intense jump cuts and ellipses at the beginning of Harry.  Instead of asserting the primacy of the nuclear family as a way to resolve crisis, however, Allen asserts the primacy of his own individual male authorship.  Not only does this resolution assert the primacy of authorship.  The assertion of the male author remains compatible with a discourse on family.

Of course, Allen still problematizes his authorship in a variety of interesting ways.  Allen’s relationship with Previn serves as a structuring referent in this problematization.  For example, the sequence in Deconstructing Harry with Robin Williams uses camera focus to signify among other things a mid-life crisis.  In one of the first musical sequences in Wildman Blues, Allen’s band celebrates the “vulgar” aspect of what they call “pure” music.  As the documentary proceeds, it presents Allen as a split subject, a tortured artist dogged by the daily aspects of his own celebrity.

[show clips]

Problematizing his own authorship remains a key feature of Allen’s work.  But at the same time, such problematization ultimately works to justify this authorship.  Just as Robin Williams suffers from how people see him, he still demands that people see him.  His problem emerges as everyone’s problem.  In a similar way, Allen’s assertion of a problematic yet coherent authorship ultimately work to manage, contain and resolve the threat posed by his relationship with Soon Yi Previn.

Works Cited

Gleick, Elizabeth and Mary Huzinec.  "Up Front: He Said, She Said."  People 12 Apr. 1993.  Electric Library.  Online.  Internet.  14 Mar. 1999.