Pulling a Woody

I have been thinking of Mr. Allen again.

Woody Allen has started filming “Fading Gigolo,” director John Turturro’s movie starring the “Manhattan” director and sexy leading ladies Sofía Vergara, Sharon Stone and Johnny Depp’s ex Vanessa Paradis.

It's interesting, and must be a source of some pain to Mr. Allen, that he is remembered primarily for a movie he considers his worst effort. In any case, he is wrong. Manhattan is by far his best movie. The punchline to the whole story is that he is cast in the Turturro movie as a pimp.

But back to Mr. Allen and his odd moral stature among the new clerisy. The term "new clerisy", which deserves to catch on, comes from a brilliant article by Joel Kotkin and refers to

“new hierarchies of technical elites” that Daniel Bell predicted in 1976 in The Coming Of Post-Industrial Society. For that group, Bell wrote, nature and human nature ceased to be central, as “fewer now handle artifacts or things” so that “reality is primarily the social world”—which, he warned, “gives rise to a new Utopianism” that mistakenly treats human nature as something that can be engineered and corrected by instruction from their enlightened betters. This approach, although often grounded in good intention, can easily morph into a technocratic authoritarianism.

I would add, however, that although this group believes that nature and human nature can be overcome, they also have a tendency to accept fate and a tragic explanation of life.

Consider the classic problem of "falling" in love with one person when you're married to someone else. What do you do about it? The tragic worldview accepts this falling in love as fate. The non-tragic view says you can, with God's help, transcend this. Let's read a little reaction to such a case. The following is Keira Knightly and an interviewer from a piece in Interview magazine giving Newt Gingrich some well-deserved mockery. But the fascinating bit is how Knightly simply cannot see any sort of transcendent forgiveness or justice as anything but a joke:

CRONENBERG: Well, I've heard from Newt Gingrich that open marriages are the thing now.

KNIGHTLEY: That's what Newt Gingrich is saying?

CRONENBERG:Well, apparently his ex-wife says that Newt came to her and said, "I've got this mistress, and I think we should all sort of just accept that this is an open marriage." Of course, he probably wasn't thinking of his wife taking advantage of the privileges of an open marriage, but he thought that it was quite all right for him to have a couple of ladies and that they should both accept it.

KNIGHTLEY: Well, that is a problem. If you're a Republican in America and then you're also sort of shagging anything that moves—I think that's always difficult, isn't it?

CRONENBERG: Except he's got the right-wing Christian out: "I asked god for forgiveness and he said okay." [laughs] If you're a Christian right-wing Republican, then that might make it okay. But the thing is, Newt was the guy who was attacking Bill Clinton for his Monica Lewinsky moment while he himself was having an extramarital affair. So the hypocrisy is rather thick at that point.

KNIGHTLEY: Absolutely extraordinary . . . If only I wasn't an atheist, I could get away with anything. You'd just ask for forgiveness and then you'd be forgiven. It sounds much better than having to live with guilt.

As is so often the case, Knightly doesn't seem to understand the difference between "guilt" and "shame". Guilt is the thing that Gingrich obviously did not have. If he'd been aware of his own guilt he'd have had some regard for human frailty* in others. Knightly neither knows nor cares much about guilt. What she understands is shame and she wants Gingrich to be burdened with tons of it so that he, or anyone who thinks like him for that matter, will be unelectable. She wants to drive him out of polite society.

The important difference between the two is this: guilt is something you would feel even if you weren't caught. If Gingrich or Clinton were the sort of men capable of feeling guilt they would have been torn by it long before their behaviour was exposed. Shame is something that is only felt at the thought of the greater society you live in knowing and condemning what you have done.

You can, of course, have anticipatory shame. That is you could have cheated on your spouse and have gotten away with it but be constantly dreading the shame would come with getting caught. Someone in such a situation will be motivated to keep their behaviour a secret but will not be motivated to atone for or ask forgiveness for what they have done. They might wish they had not done what they did in the fate of possible exposure but the practical effect is that they are only motivated to try even harder to avoid getting caught.

In two Woody Allen films, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point a man who finds himself in the position of desperately needing to avoid shame for an affair actually murders the woman he was having an affair with in order to keep what he has done a secret. And then he is racked with "guilt". For a while. Eventually this anticipatory shame that Allen mistakes for guilt goes away. The following is Woody Allen musing about it all in two parts, part one:

I feel that is true—that one can commit a crime, do unspeakable things, and get away with it. There are people who commit all sorts of crimes and get away with it, and some of them are plagued with all sorts of guilt for the rest of their lives and others aren’t. They commit terrible crimes and they have wonderful lives, wonderful, happy lives, with families and children, and they have done unspeakably terrible things. There is no justice, there is no rational structure to it. That is just the way it is, and each person figures out some way to cope….

This is obviously deeper than Keira Knightly (not a tall order, Barbie dolls are deeper than Keira Knightly). But while Allen has obviously thought of it longer, notice that he, like she, can only think of guilt and/or shame as a negative thing that needs to be made to go away. It's sort of like acne: "If I could get rid of these pimples then I could get girls to put out and I'd be happier". The guilt (which is really anticipatory shame) is something that stands in between me and a comfortable, easy life.

One gets the feeling that neither Knightly nor Allen appreciate the degree to which their elite stature in our society is a result of either colossal fluke or the workings of grace. In some abstract sense they get it but they clearly go through life comfortable with their elite status and privileges. It doesn't trouble them to think that millions of other people couldn't dream of such a thing and millions more suffer in ways that neither of them could bear every day and yet manage to "cope" better than they do.

Here is part two of Allen's musings:

Some people cope better than others. I was with Billy Graham once, and he said that even if it turned out in the end that there is no God and the universe is empty, he would still have had a better life than me. I understand that. If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through. Even if you are proven wrong in the end, you would have had a better life.

Again, notice that Allen only sees faith as a way of getting bailed out in the end. Even the views he projects onto religious believers are antinomian; it's always about avoiding suffering for your moral failings. There are of course, brands of protestantism that are antinomian and even some Catholics like Newt Gingrich who behave as if they think that their religion gives them a get of jail free card, but Allen never confronts the choice to believe in a God who is a source of justice; a God who might well, almost certainly will for most of us, cause us to suffer for our sins and, further, weird as this may seem, would do so because he loves us.

The Woody Allen interview I cite here ends with a discussion of Shane and Allen says the following about the character.

I didn’t see him as a martyred figure, a persecuted figure. I saw him as quite a heroic figure who does a job that needs to be done, a practical matter. I saw him as a practical secular character. In this world there are just some people who need killing and that is just the way it is. It sounds terrible, but there is no other way to get around that, and most of us are not up to doing it, incapable for moral reasons or physically not up to it. And Shane is a person who saw what had to be done and went out and did it. He had the skill to do it, and that’s the way I feel about the world: there are certain problems that can only be dealt with that way. As ugly a truth as that is, I do think it’s the truth about the world.

Now I don't think Allen understands Shane at all but I want you to feel the full chill of what he says here: " In this world there are just some people who need killing and that is just the way it is". Now that might seem acceptable in the limited context of the movie Shane where the men the hero kills are a corrupt cattle baron and a professional killer who are threatening to kill innocent people to get there way. But in this interview, the whole issue arose because of a discussion of Allen's in which a man has his mistress killed because she threatens his ordered, married life. That is the larger context of "some people just need killing".

In conclusion, notice how bourgeois Woody Allen is. He isn't the sort of guy who'd actually take a hit out on his mistress (Crimes and Misdemeanors) or kill her directly (Match Point). No, he's the sort of guy who'd sit at home imagining such a thing and could convince himself that it's all okay at a certain distance, just so long as none of it rubs off on him. That would be intolerable because it would be shameful.

* I've shamelessly swiped the construction "some regard for human frailty" from The Philadelphia Story:

Tracy: You seem quite contemptuous of me all of a sudden.

Dexter: No, Red, not of you, never of you. Red, you could be the finest woman on this earth. I'm contemptuous of something inside of you you either can't help, or make no attempt to; your so-called 'strength' - your prejudice against weakness - your blank intolerance.

Tracy: Is that all?

Dexter: That's the gist of it; because you'll never be a first-class human being or a first-class woman, until you've learned to have some regard for human frailty. It's a pity your own foot can't slip a little sometime - but your sense of inner divinity wouldn't allow that. This goddess must and shall remain intact. There are more of you than people realize - a special class of the American Female. The Married Maidens.

Tracy Samantha Lord's foot does slip of course and she learns something from it. When Woody Allen's foot slips, he, with the help of his analyst, convinces himself that he just needs the bad feeling to go away so he can live a comfortable, bourgeois life. That is the personal morality of the new clerisy. It's a personal morality in the sense that that is what they apply to themselves; they wouldn't let anyone they disapproved of get away with it.