39: Paragon of Angst at his Jejune Best

39 

Paragon of Angst at his Jejune Best 

“To get excited about life, he had to take a life. How perverse is that?” Penny commented, referring to the new Woody Allen movie Irrational Man, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the self-consumed philosophy professor Abe Lucas and Emma Stone as his awestruck student lover Jill Pollard; and it didn’t surprise me that only three people had shown up to see the Sunday matinee at the Uptown Theatre in Barrie the other day: Woody Allen has lost his relevance as a storyteller of the human condition.

I’ve gone through different phases with Woody Allen movies (he’s made 42), and as much as I used to find his movies comedic expressions of the human condition that sincerely addressed the existential questions of life, his movies have evolved into a self-parody of the perennial Woody Allen condition, suggesting that the iconic director can’t extricate himself from the highly lucrative existential narrative that he has boxed himself into which he defined by having Abe Lucas quote Sartre’s famous line “hell is other people,” and Irrational Man illustrates the paragon of angst at his jejune best.

“Much of philosophy is verbal masturbation,” says Abe Lucas to his students at Braylin, the Rhode Island college where his addition to the philosophy department caused quite a buzz before his arrival—which reminded me why I dropped out in my third year of philosophy studies at university and moved on to real-life experience where I found the answers that philosophy failed to give me in the endless struggle of daily living with honesty and integrity—“he labors good on good to fix and owes to virtue every triumph that he know,” said Wordsworth in his poem “Character of the Happy Warrior,” which became the ideal of my life; but the Kierkegaardian “terror of freedom” still haunted the aging director, if not the man.

“Man is condemned to be free,” said the French philosopher Sartre, which Allen exploits to save Abe Lucas from the dread of existential despair and give his tediously jejune story traction. But again, Woody Allen is consistent; and his story fails to inspire because it sinks into moral turpitude and philosophical justification, which was why Penny said what she did about the movie over dinner at Wimpy’s Diner.

But that’s Woody Allen, a perverse little man who had a sexual affair with his partner Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi that caused the scandal of his life which he veiled in his movie Irrational Man to vindicate himself for what he felt was unfair treatment by the judge who had ruled against him in his protracted legal battle with Mia Farrow; but the creative writer/director took it to the extreme in Irrational Man and played out the fantasy by having Abe Lucas and his awestruck student Jill overhear a woman’s desperate plea in a restaurant and having him murder the judge for his unfair treatment of the woman who was going to lose custody of her children.

“A righteous murder,” Abe Lucas justified, which was a curious thing to say given that he believed much of philosophy was verbal masturbation; but, ironically, it was the thought of murdering the judge that reawakened Abe Lucas’s interest in life and cured him of sexual impotence. An old theme borrowed from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which Allen had drawn upon before for his movies.

When the movie ended, the only other person in Uptown’s Theater 3 with the reclining soft leather chairs, laughed when I told him that I was a philosophy student at university and like Abe Lucas also thought that much of philosophy was verbal masturbation; and the man said, “You should write Woody Allen and tell him that.”

But what would be the point? Allen has made a career out of “milking the udder of despair” who “churns the sour milk of life into pure gold” (this is from my poem “The Guru of Angst” that was inspired by Leonard Cohen, whom I’ve always seen as a sincere poetic version to Woody Allen’s inauthenticity); and besides, after 37 years of psychotherapy, he’s much too old to change his ways and remains a “militant Freudian atheist,” as he described himself, who believes that “the heart has no logic.” A pathetic case of self-absorption that respects no boundaries for the heart’s desire.

So next summer we can expect another Woody Allen movie, if he’s still around (he’s 71); and I’d bet my bottom dollar that we’ll get another variation of the same tired theme of a bored older man and younger woman and all the dread, anxiety, and despair that comes along with it; and if I go to see it, it will only be to confirm my new saying, which was born of hard-won experience and not philosophical masturbation: we can be certain of one thing in life, and that is people will always disappoint you.

Look at what happened to our hero Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s new novel Go Set a Watchman; so I’d like to give Woody Allen the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t. His movie Irrational Man was fun to watch, but ultimately disappointing.         

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