Morning Becomes Reagan: A
revisiting of 1980s pop (and political) culture
(This series was sketchily outlined,
originally under a different name, near the end of this entry. A
“keynote” blog entry on this series is to come.)
Also under the series:
“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
Subsections below:
I. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (Semi-Quick
Vu): A partner-switching romp in a pastoral vein
Midsummer shows a change of
direction, and maybe a reflection of broader culture-warming
A story neatly serves the rural-locale peregrinations of colorful
characters
Some of the funnier, less-tendentious one-liners
One-liners on the issue of love
Allen’s philosophy and the question of love
A beautifully photographed film—perhaps Allen’s best in this regard
II. Zelig (Quick Vu): A
mock-historical doc on a “human chameleon”
A technical marvel that aims parodic
darts at the American will to pop-culture crazes and ephemera, and the Jewish
drive to assimilate
For culture vultures, an “intelligentsia fest”
I. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (Semi-Quick
Vu): A partner-switching romp in a pastoral vein
It’s interesting to look at old
films, as much as you thought you knew the artist/director, from later years
and detect patterns in them that weren’t evident at the time (at least to you
when you were a naïve college student). For instance, Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy—which I
never saw when it came out, though I seem to recall the ads and/or the flavor
of the reviews—strikes me as having a surprising lot in common, on technical
levels, with a few of Allen’s earlier films, all of which are fairly different
from each other: Sleeper (because of,
in Midsummer, the close attention to sometimes-quirky
period detail, even featuring Allen in a flying machine), Love and Death, and even the significantly more refined (than Sleeper and L&D) Manhattan.
I wouldn’t have thought this
comparison stuff from what I heard about Midsummer
in 1982, and if I had, I might not have wanted to see it for that reason,
because it would have seemed a step back; but seeing it now, I’m pleasantly
surprised by it.
Among its ways it echoes
qualities of previous work, Midsummer
uses, as soundtrack music, pieces of composer Felix Mendelssohn (including a
wedding theme under the opening titles), and in this general respect, it seems
more like Love and Death (which
featured Prokofiev) than any other film of his between the two. Yet Midsummer seems such an advance beyond Love and Death, in ways I’ll look at.
Technically, it seems about as well crafted as his other work since his tide-turning
Annie Hall (1977).
Meanwhile, on some other levels,
Midsummer seems as if it were “retro”
in Allen terms…well, let’s take a closer look.
Midsummer shows a change of
direction, and maybe a reflection of broader culture-warming
In short, Midsummer represents a big tonal shift away from Allen’s more
frankly personal-issues films (i.e., amid whatever else, dealing with despair
and meaning in life amid interpersonal busy-ness), from Annie Hall (1977) through Stardust
Memories (1980). Yet Allen’s big stock of better-movie-making tools is in play
here, with his production “A team” including cinematographer Gordon Willis
(doing some of his best work for Allen here) and production designer Mel
Bourne. In a way, Allen is arranging features he’s already well used, in a
new-seeming combination.
It’s possible Allen (“in the project-planning
back room,” with his agents and producers) felt some pressure to provide more
audience-friendly work. Meanwhile, whether this film also reflected any sense he
independently acquired (orienting any
will to pander to the audience) of a “change in broader culture,” as I’ll look
at in my future “keynote” entry on the series “Morning Becomes Reagan,” is
unclear. (After Allen had worked with United Artists through several films,
ending with Stardust Memories, the
distributing studio for Midsummer was
Orion partnered with Warner Brothers, which partnership I believe was behind Zelig also; Orion, alone, would
distribute Allen’s films over the next several years.)
Actually, both of Allen’s early
1980s films that I review in this entry, in their content, do show some closer
attention to nicely articulated articles of culture—while the films still have
some of the 1970s earthiness he could embody—as he turns to the more ideal, and to the more poetic (as did, in his own way
in 1982, director Francis Ford Coppola, to be considered below).
And looking back, I would say
that is one way I can characterize the 1980s, which to an extent seemed this
way even at the time, as the decade went on: that is, the decade seemed newly
poetic, in culture that at least college kids would embrace. (This though maybe
I was too young to conceive of it quite as neatly as I do here.)
The 1980s, especially in pop
culture, and by late 1984 or early 1985, seemed
to feature a return to the poetic in the way that 1960s pop culture had been a time of playfulness and poetry,
though that period—ending in the late 1960s with social turbulence over the
Vietnam War, etc.—preceded the blistering realism, questioning, and paranoia of
the 1970s.
Even if this makes the case
rather too broadly, Allen’s early 1980s movies certainly show him aiming more
to a “college student ideas-infatuated” mentality, whether or not this was
dictated by market considerations posed by his alliance with big studios that
were to distribute the films (Orion and Warner).
A story neatly serves the rural-locale peregrinations of colorful
characters
The script seems almost as if it
was edited by someone other than Allen (an unlikelihood, I think), as it
largely traces the interests of the storyline, which features partner-swapping
that is busier than that of Manhattan, though the time is about 1900, not
1979. Meanwhile, Midsummer is less
realistic than Manhattan in this regard, seeming somewhat
like a farce without entirely being so. Also, there is less focus on zingy
one-liners such as grab you by the lapels in his late-’70s films. In all, the
script is like B+ Allen work, somehow taking the best approaches of his last
several films while somehow being “its own creature” and on the inoffensive
side.
There are three couples: Leopold
(played by Jose Ferrer), a pompous professor of philosophy who is the
oldest of them all, who is esteemed in his field (at least in his own mind),
and is about to get married. The woman he is to marry is Ariel Weymouth (played
by Mia Farrow, her first time with Allen here). They are going to meet
for a leisurely weekend (before Leopold and Ariel’s wedding) at Leopold’s cousin’s
country house; the cousin is Adrian (played by Mary Steenburgen), who is
married to Andrew (played by Allen).
Andrew had worked on Wall
Street, and had left under perhaps a cloud, or on the basis of disillusionment;
he is now utilizing his talents at inventing things, including a pedal-operated
flying contraption he uses to fly around their rural area. This quaint detail
reminds me a bit of the weird development in the animated Peanuts features where Snoopy, already an amazing polymath of a
hound, flies around like a helicopter with his ears spinning like
propellers.
A plot source of trouble comes
early on: Andrew and Ariel had once had a relationship, and Andrew is
shocked/spooked that she is coming to his house.
There is a yet a third couple, a
doctor friend of Andrew’s, Maxwell, played by Tony Roberts, a longtime
acting associate of Allen’s (also in Annie
Hall, Stardust Memories, and Hannah
and Her Sisters [1986]). Maxwell is accompanied by his nurse/office
assistant Dulcy, played by Julie Hagerty, here employing the same “dopey
female” voice as she did in the laugh-a-minute Airplane! (1980), but as in the earlier film her voice turns out to
belie some earthy smarts that leave people a little foolish to underestimate
her. Maxwell and Dulcy are the randiest couple to make the scene, and are the
source of much of the true farce of this story. And though they come to the
country house looking to have a different physically-oriented partnership than
they do professionally back in the office, they will soon find that they want
to partner with one or more of the others there.
You can sort of see already that
a lot of the story will involve hectic/clandestine partner-switching, with both
the comic potential and the occasional philosophical aside about love (the real
thing) coming into the mix. If you think this film sounds a little
bird-brained, I think it’ll surprise you that it’s a little smarter than it may
sound, while it’s not among Allen’s top-grade work.
Some of the funnier, less-tendentious one-liners
Among the one-liners (such as
they are; some quotes may be paraphrases):
* Dulcy, on arriving at Andrew’s
place and noticing with some delight a hammock on the property, to Adrian: “I
lost it in a hammock. You really have to have good balance.”
* Andrew explaining his Wall
Street line of work, at the dinner table: “I take care of people’s investments
until there is nothing left.” (Amusing for its pre-Madoff prescience.)
* Another Andrew remark on his
career/nature: “I’m not a poet, I don’t die for love, I work on Wall Street.”
Understated as satire, to be sure.
* In a very early scene, Leopold—in
his college class, amid a philosophic discussion that sets the not-too-crucial thematic
tone as to whether there is more to the world than atoms and other empirically
identifiable matter—intones in response to a questing student: “I did not
create the cosmos, I merely explain it.”
* Later, when Maxwell is confessing
his anxiety to Andrew about Ariel being about to be married to a “pompous ass,”
Andrew says, “Well, at this time [tomorrow, or some other day], she’ll be Mrs.
Pompous Ass.”
Funny, both this line and the
Leopold one just above I recall seeing performed before, as if I saw the whole
film before. But I didn’t remember the entire film as I viewed it this winter,
and it seems to have been many years since I saw it (at maybe a film festival,
or such), and I have a feeling I saw it under distracted circumstances, or I
left partway through.
One-liners on the issue of love
The partner-swapping situations
allow occasions for philosophic remarks on love, and—in terms of either Allen’s
rather pessimistic-if-not-entirely-heartless eye, or a bigger chance this film
had to comment on love—these seem a little on the tepid side:
* Andrew at one point: “Sex
alleviates tension, and love causes it.”
* “The best opportunities happen
only once.” (One of the females says this. Not terribly original or gripping,
as to love or otherwise.)
* Incidentally, the philosophic
question is offered, at least by Ariel, of, Can you have lust for someone
without also being in love with the person?
* Maxwell goes through an
especially strong period of anxiety, regarding wanting to have sexual relations
with someone present who is not to be
his mate before marriage prevents the ability to do it (this of course operates
for him on both abstract and grippingly concrete levels). (Leopold, for his
part, has basically the same idea.) “Marriage is the death of hope,” Maxwell
says at least once; this idea comes up in the story a few times, maybe out of
the mouth of someone else, too. In these guys’ eyes, true hope—at least in
terms of sex/love—can only be had if one has a fling before marriage “cuts it
off permanently.” So, in view of this, Maxwell is like a frat boy, almost, in
wanting to have a fling with Ariel before Ariel’s marriage to Leopold prevents
such a thing.
* A little more incisive and
more in line with Allen’s storylines and views is when, after he has had a roll
in the hay (almost literally) with Ariel outdoors somewhere, Andrew says, “You
really do learn an awful lot about yourself through love-making,” while both he
and Ariel seem a little on the sickened, or disillusioned, side.
The likes of Allen’s later (and
clearly better) film Hannah and Her
Sisters would suggest that, when he is most full-blooded and least
facetious in his writing—if Midsummer
is indeed considered an example of his being facetious—he conveys that love can
have a place in life, being a place for reconciliation, and a reflection or
embodiment of contentment and hope.
This film, in terms of its story
saying much about love, seems on the half-hearted side. It is amusing, and
pleasant enough (if you can envision this along with the jaded-seeming
one-liners), but it doesn’t offer brilliant insights. Not as I thought, anyway,
after having watched it twice (three viewings would have been better).
Allen’s philosophy and the question of love
One of the things I find
puzzling about Allen’s philosophy, where it encompasses love, is how he makes
remarks about it as if—if I’m reading him right—true love only happens once; or
maybe his idea is that an “access” (or “rush,” to use the more teenage word) of
love is only when it really happens, and that is only once. Is this what he
believes (unless he is presenting it just as articles of the shallowness of the
characters here)?
(By the way, this is not to
suggest that this philosophic point has much or anything to do with his later
family issues, of 1992 and after, regarding his future wife Soon-Yi Previn and
others. I am looking just at his ideas in this film, as resonate with a few
other films not far removed from it in time. I think the ideas here—particularly
on love—are a little abstract and arguably sophomoric, though this film admittedly
seems to have been written in part to be a sort of inoffensive product out of
Allen’s fold, not with a lot of pointed remarks, such as are found in Stardust Memories.)
At the end of Sleeper, he has a line that, if I
recorded it right, is that (as I note in my review of the film) the most important things in life only come
“once,” sex and death, and at least you’re not nauseous after death. I recorded
this as a sort of pithy final one-liner capping that film, but—as I was puzzled
about, a bit, at the time—what he means by ‘love coming only once,’ I’m not
sure. I don’t know if he means the truest
of true love, or a sort of mystically
regarded experience of true ecstasy. And if this is his view, I wonder, is
this concept also echoed in Midsummer,
especially in what riotously happens to Leopold near the end, where he dies at
the height of passion during intercourse (with Dulcy—it just happened, you know), with a smile on his
face?
People could be turned off by
Allen’s consciously existentialist points in his films (maybe considering them
a sort of perverse dogma): the remarking on despair, the reminders of a need
for courage, the questions about the existence of God. Even if someone didn’t
like these remarks, he or she could still enjoy a lot of his films for their
humor (just as one can enjoy the warmly humorous side of a lot of religious
people). In this regard, it would be like, in concrete dealings with someone,
“filtering out” that person’s expressions of religious belief or “testaments of
faith,” when he or she offers these a little too often—the religious enthusiast
who (manners-wise) can be said, in the U.S., to be a little rude to the extent
that not everyone wants to hear that stuff every five minutes outside church
(or an A.A. meeting).
And yes, I do think an
existentialist can be considered not terribly different in a general sense from
a devout adherent to a religion; in fact, in the annals of existentialist
philosophy, exponents range from the atheist Jean-Paul Sartre to the Catholic thinker Adrian van Kaam, the latter of whom was associated with the
University of Pittsburgh. You could easily say that Allen’s reminders of his
existentialist beliefs are his ongoing itches to address religious questions,
which someone who doesn’t fully share could either ignore when appreciating
what else Allen has to offer, or may find such a grating “tic” that it turns
the person off Allen’s work entirely.
If Allen’s point is that Leopold
happened to get lucky in the love department by dying right when he was in
sexual ecstasy—and notice how, atypically for him, he includes the
whimsical—and obviously non-materialist, non-scientific—detail of a weird
device that Andrew has invented to “see spirits” or such, and to foretell the
future—then Allen seems to cap this off with his “fairyland” detail of having
Leopold’s spirit fly off like a glowing firefly or such, metaphysically allowed
to do so by the circumstances of his death.
As a fanciful mode by which Allen
has a character die in a rather optimism-suggestive
way, this is rather nice; but if this detail is actually underscoring
Allen’s idea that love in its truest form somehow only comes in a single “shot”
for any one individual, I find that an item of “philosophy” that’s not even
typical of the usual forms of existentialism, to the extent I understand them.
Am I reading this point of
Allen’s right (and hence criticizing it right)?
Interestingly, it is Allen’s
character Andrew, the whimsical inventor, who is most apt to remind people, and
believe, that there is more to life than meets the eye.
A beautifully photographed film—perhaps Allen’s best in this regard
You would enjoy Midsummer, if not for the more
philosophic points in its script, then for the simple play of the plot, and
especially for the photography. There are nature shots (as of birds and
animals—and not dopily or sentimentally framed) and, light- and color-wise,
well-composed shots. This goes to show that if Allen could be prevailed on to
get out of NYC and take the risks of snuggling up to crickets and bees in a
summertime countryside, he can actually capture a good film in the process.
Midsummer historically can be considered as turning in a very
sensual way (especially pictorial) to its love theme, similarly in a very broad way to what Francis Ford Coppola did when
he turned from national trauma that he treated in Apocalypse Now (1979) to the visually rich but plot-limited One From the Heart (1982), which Coppola
felt was a turn to a positive topic he thought U.S. audiences could use next.
As it happened, the latter was a box-office disaster for Coppola, making only a
small percentage of its enormous cost; and though people may have had the
impression that the super-long-production Apocalypse
is what initiated Coppola’s financial problems that ran over many years, it was
not. It was One From the Heart that
did it.
Anyway, One From the Heart—though I haven’t seen it—was probably not as
successful in artistic terms as Midsummer
was, in its more modest way, for Allen.
II. Zelig (Quick Vu): A
mock-historical doc on a “human chameleon”
A technical marvel that aims parodic
darts at the American will to pop-culture crazes and ephemera, and the Jewish
drive to assimilate
Zelig, more than any of Allen’s other films from the time, obviously
harkens back to Take the Money and Run
(1969), as a faux documentary. Yet it is far more well-tooled than the earlier
film, and among its talking heads, it features many noted intellectual leaders
of the time.
This film is so obviously meant
for entertaining that I may do well just to say “Check it out and see if you
like it,” rather than analyze it much. It seems that the film was in some state
of preparation for close to three years, to judge from promo copy included in
the DVD (distributed by MGM’s DVD division) for the later film Broadway Danny Rose (1984).
For culture vultures, an “intelligentsia fest”
One thing I like about Zelig is that, among its talking heads
who gamely provide some fictional commentary in line with Allen’s story
precepts, there are notable intellectuals some or all of whom are deceased now:
Susan Sontag,
fiction writer, essayist, and all-around belletrist, author of Against Interpretation and Illness as Metaphor, the latter of which
I read and was influenced by years ago.
Irving Howe, a
“public intellectual” of the old kind, a writer of socialist bent who could
provide very useful explanatory essays such as an afterword appended to a
modern reprint of Theodore Dreiser’s An
American Tragedy.
Bruno Bettelheim,
an old-time (Freudian) psychiatrist, especially of troubled children.
Saul Bellow, a
major 20th-century American novelist and Nobel Prize winner; he
authored Henderson the Rain King, Herzog,
Humboldt’s Gift, and More Die of
Heartbreak, among other works. It’s nice to see him, in his relaxed/elegant
way, play along with the Zelig precepts
in remarking, as was historically true, that the Nazi movement allowed someone
to get lost in what the political circumstances allowed—as he says, “the
immersion in the mass and anonymity”—which the character Leonard Zelig,
fictionally, does.
John Morton Blum, a
professor, the only name among these I don’t know.
There are what seem to be a
couple of real-life old newspaper professionals also among the talking heads.
The narrator is a dry, urbane
British sort, in place of Take the Money
and Run’s authoritatively sonorous Jackson Beck.
There are so many fun “special
effects” and nice details to this film, you should just see it. Among the details
is a song titled “Chameleon Days,” sung—with “poo-poo-pe-doo”—by Mae Questel, who in real life voiced Olive Oyl and Betty Boop
of the 1930s cartoons.
