Shootout at 'Truth' Corral:

Big Woody Is Gunning for Big Fyodor

by Gary Cox

Copyright 1992 by Gary Duane Cox.

Contact the author at garyduanecox@mindspring.com

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I'd been putting off seeing Woody Allen's new movie. It's 'like this--I'm in the literature racket; you know, undergraduate teaching and scholarship--that kind of thing. Russian variety, get the picture? So when this guy Allen brings out a new picture with a title like "Crimes and Misdemeanors," I know it can mean only one thing for the likes of me--more work! So, like I say, I'd been putting it off, spending my time polishing my piece on intertextuality in Pushkin--when this swell dame I know calls up and says the picture's leaving town this weekend; tomorrow's the last day.

"Alright, sweetheart," I say. "I'll meet you there."

Boy was I ever on target. This was it alright! The main event: Allen's shootout with the big guy, the one he's been stalking all his life.

Fade to scene: . . . . He strides past the swinging doors and up to the bar, a diminutive man, wiry, with absurd reddish blond hair and an expression of . . . I dunno . . . . I guess you'd call it, "existential angst," or something. He speaks to the bartender.

"You know a gunslinger in this here milieu that goes by the name of . . . Dostoevsky. . . . Fyodor Dostoevsky?"

The bartender goes goggle-eyed with fear. "You wanna talk to Big Fyodor?"

"That's him. Big Fyodor," says the newcomer, calmly lighting the filter end of a cigarette.

"Wh . . . wh . . . who should I say . . . I mean, what's. I mean if . . . ."

"Just tell him it's . . . Big Woody. Tell him I wanna have a little talk . . . 'bout Truth, . . . 'n' God, . . . 'n' guilt! I'II be waitin' in the street."

The bartender gulps hard and races up the back stairway, two steps at a time, while Big Woody strides back out through the swinging doors, which whap him on the backswing, almost knocking him over.

Big Fyodor came out a couple of minutes later. Also slight of build, even frail, with a wispy beard of nondescript color, and cavernous eyes, behind which one seemed to see . . . everything. He stroked his beard and frowned. He'd been interrupted in the middle of a meditation on Anselm's ontological proof, and he didn't like it one bit.

As the two faced off in the street, bystanders scurried inside to safety, and a hush fell over the town, injuring several pedestrians. The two stood nervously eying each other for a moment, and then a third figure emerged from one of the buildings- -an old man, gesticulating desperately, as though urging them to stop. At first it looked like a Russian orthodox priest, in a cassock with a pendant cross, and wearing one of those whadya-call-ems on his head. But amazingly, from just a slightly different angle, he looked like a Jewish rabbi in a yarmulke and kittel. The book under his arm offered no clue; neither Bible nor Torah, it was a one-volume edition of The Complete Short Stories of Meister Eckhart.

"It's Holy Alyosha," cried a terror-stricken voice from the tavern. "He's trying to stop them."

"If . . if . . . if I . . . " the old man wheezed between coughing spells," if I had to choose between . . ." --here he was overcome with coughing. But in a moment he recovered and went on: "If I had to choose between God and the truth, I would choose God."

Allen's lip curled in rage as he turned on the wizened old holy fool and opened fire with both barrels. As the first bullet hit him full in the chest, Holy Alyosha stood transfixed for a moment, his eyes rolling heavenward, his arms spread-eagled; then his body began to jerk as though epileptically, as Allen fired round after round into him. (This was especially extraordinary as Allen had no automatic weapon and had to keep stopping to reload his six-shooters.) Allen kept on firing even after the body had crumpled, and the inanimate heap of flesh continued to spasm convulsively, just like in "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Godfather." Spots of bright red popped out one by one on the jerking corpse, looking like the impossibly sudden onset of a case of chicken pox or zits. At last, his rage spent, Allen stopped shooting, and the lifeless flesh of what had, moments ago, been the holy fool Alyosha lay still. The eyes of the corpse were wide open, and behind them one seemed to see nothing. Allen turned to Big Fyodor.

"Some guys just piss me off," he rapped out. "Get the picture?"

Big Fyodor said nothing, but began slowly advancing, with measured steps, toward the death-dealing filmmaker. The onlookers, safe behind the windows of the tavern and other Main Street emporia, caught their breath as they stared, imbibing the palpable tension, although some were having whisky and soda. When at last Big Fyodor and Big Woody were eyeball to eyeball, the Russian novelist leaned forward and silently, kindly, planted the kiss of forgiveness on the American filmmaker's cheek. (Actually, there was some controversy among the townspeople about the meaning of this kiss. One group insisted that ;it was not the kiss of forgiveness at all but the kiss of betrayal, while a second party argued that it was the kiss of death. Later on a third group suggested that it might be the kiss of polysemic intertextuality, but they were not taken seriously, as their leader was a former Jesuit priest from Bialystok.)

At this point, a band struck up a moderately peppy rendition of "Blame It on the Bossa Nova," and the two gunslingers danced off into the sunset . . .

Fade back.

Yes, there was no two ways about it--this meant work for me. of course, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this Allen guy reads Russian literature, and likes it--or at least cares about it. Matter of fact, I've been meaning for years to toss off an article about it. But this was a different matter--this was a clear statement of intellectual debt, and at the same time a forceful rejection of the mentor's basic presuppositions. That's right, sweetheart--parody, in the Russian formalist sense! Hell, we're not talking article--we're talking monograph.

Of course, meanwhile there'll have to be a piece on all the eye symbolism, but that's all pretty obvious, Freshman- Intro-to-Lit stuff--it can go into Monarch Notes or something, but with an aside about how amazingly well it works, despite its obviousness. And maybe I can work the topic into a few footnotes in the Pushkin intertextuality thing, in an offhand kind of way, of course. But I can't postpone the monograph too long. This is big!

"Margo, cancel my Thai Chi for next Thursday . . . . Hell, cancel it for the whole semester!" I've gotta get to work.

Fade to expository.

The sophomoric preceding is an homage to the early Woody Allen. [That's pronounced to rhyme with the French word for cheese, as the American pronounciation invites confusion with the omij a peasant undergarment in the Uzbek lowlands.] What follows attempts to understand the mature Woody Allen, who, with Crimes and Misdemeanors, has emerged as the most important 19th century Russian writer currently working in America.

Allen's penchant for Russian literature is widely known and as widely misunderstood. There's Love and Death of course, which is rollicking good fun. A hybrid, the film is obsessed with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as content, but treats them á la Gogol (or á la Borsht Belt ), and the travesty wears pretty thin by the end, or maybe that's just where it becomes obvious that it was pretty thin all along. But Love and Death is not Allen's only Russian film, not even his best one. What is? Well., Sleeper is his best Gogolian film, Hannah and Her Sisters is his best Chekhovian one, and now Crimes and Misdemeanors initiates a Dostoevskian stage.

An American audience is likely to know Gogol only through a couple of Hollywood movies, both completely misleading. Let it suffice to say he was a closet surrealist comic writing a generation or so before Dostoevsky. Allen's Gogolian films are the early ones, where the footage is dominated by the sheer fun of seeing things oddly and coupling the uncouplable.

Allen's Chekhovian period begins with Interiors and moves on triumphantly to Hannah and Her Sisters. (Never mind the Tolstoyan content from Anna Karenina .) Here he moves from the absurd to the real, from visual surfaces to "interiors," from self-absorption to an interest in the interaction between human beings in groups. The homage a Anton is clearest, and clumsiest, in Interiors, where the characters still seem fairly bound up in themselves, while Hannah seems to owe as much to Altman, another great American Chekhovite.

0. K., so now we come to Crimes and Misdemeanors --the shootout with Big Fyodor. It's not the first time Dostoevsky has come up in Allen's work. There's all the Dostoevskian shtick in Love and Death, of course, but even more important, under all the Gogolian and Borsht belt flim-flam of the early work, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground is the subtext of Allen's nebbish character. It's even explicit in an early sketch, "Notes from the Overfed," which came out in the New Yorker in the 60s. Dostoevsky's underground man is the apotheosis of self doubt: he views himself as a small, ridiculous, mouse-like figure, and is consumed by envy, hatred, and adoration (yes, all three) for men who are virile, decisive, successful with women and deferred to by other men. He struggles to affirm his existence and his freedom through irrational and self destructive acts. Sound like the Woody Allen persona? It is, except that Allen treats the figure comically; Dostoevsky's work, a scripture for existentialists, treats it quite seriously (well, o. k., there's an occasional malicious laugh).

And the Woody Allen nebbish appears in Crimes and Misdemeanors, prompting some viewers to to pelt the screen with Milk Duds and Jordon Almonds. But isn't he here because we all, by now, identify him as Woody Allen the filmmaker? And Woody Allen the filmmaker must be present in this film. It personalizes the philosophical battle between Allen and Dostoevsky--it makes it a shootout, a disputation, or better yet, a parody.

"Crimes and Misdemeanors" is a parody of Crime and Punishment because it takes up the same question but comes up with a different answer. What is the impact of a secret crime on the mind, both ask, and Dostoevsky's answer is that the secret criminal will be tormented until he confesses or kills himself. Allen looks at the same material, considers the same answers--and rejects them. He deliberately lifts a few scenes bodily out of Dostoevskyls novel- he murderer alone with the corpse at the scene of the crime, the detective's visit), and we expect the same results to follow. They don't. Alone with the corpse, the murderer is impressed only with how dead she is; there's nothing behind her eyes. We're afraid in that scene, as in the corresponding Dostoevsky one, that he will be caught. (Wait! Surely we think, as moral citizens, that he ought to be caught! Don't we? No?) But no one comes to the door; there is no cliff hanger, no hair's breadth coincidental escape. He leaves.

When the detective shows up in the office of the murderous medic, we who have read Dostoevsky pat ourselves on the back for catching the quote, lean back (stop patting first) and wait for this kindly cop to badger the murderer, Columbo-like, to confession and redemption. Then he leaves! And doesn't call back! I almost dropped my Jujy Fruits!

Allen frames the central moral question in theological terms-- does God see everything? The "shootout" over this question, and the dramatic center of the entire film, is a religious ceremony, a seder, here depicted realistically and lovingly, as in Hannah , with complex and believable characters, not with the Gogolian grotesques of Allen's earlier Jewish scenes. The character who insists on the optically ubiquitous deity is the murderer's father, a very traditional, yet very positive, figure (Freudians, start your engines). Most reviewers have been so busy congratulating themselves for noticing that this scene imitates a moment in Bergman's Wild Strawberries that they've missed the Dostoevsky quote at its center. The father's quip about preferring God over truth, should such a choice ever be necessary, is quoted directly from a letter Dostoevsky wrote to a friend in 1854, shortly after his release from prison. (Just about all of Dostoevsky's biographers mention this quote, and some of them go on and on about its significance for his existentialist Christianity. And it's obvious from "Love and Death" that Allen knows Dostoevsky's biography, so if you were planning to chalk this one up to coincidence, better luck next time.) The murderer's father prefers his belief in an ophthamologically omnipotent deity to being right. Allen makes the opposite choice; he prefers the reality he observes to the idea of a god with 20/20. He reverses Dostoevsky's meaning.

But if God can't see, who can? Even the rabbi is going blind, f'Chrissakes! Hell, the murderer is his eye doctor! Philosophically, this pushes us back to an even more fundamental question: the epistemological problem we've all been plagued with ever since Bishop Berkeley questioned the right of people with astigmatism to make identifications in police lineups. Whaddya know for sure?

Well, if God can't see straight, maybe filmmakers can. After all, it's, their job to present reality to us, to help us see. All the better if our filmmaker has a special commitment to truth-telling, if he makes grainy documentaries so honest they're boring. And sure enough, there is just such a filmmaker here; in fact, it's Woody Allen himself, the same nebbish we've all come to know and..., well, whatever .... from the earlier films. We're looking into a double frame here. The frame inside the frame belongs to the real filmmaker's double, played by the real filmmaker (boy, this is complicated!) to reinforce the doubling. So the filmmaker is the god-substitute who will see everything straight. Right?

Wrong! He screws it up. True, the Alan Alda character is irritating and obnoxious, but he is not Mussolini--even we can see that the filmmaker is just wrong. So can the Mia Farrow character, a very warm and positive figure whose judgements we trust from the beginning. She chooses him; he is endearing, she says, dismissing all the traits that have made the filmmaker's, and our, flesh crawl throughout the movie.

Just after this crushing blow, the filmmaker listens to the murderer's confession, cast in hypothetical terms, and he doesn't "see" what he is being told. He's like Crime and Punishment's Zametov, the green-behind-the-ears police clerk whose name means "the noticer" and who notices nothing, even when he is confessed to. In fact the filmmaker's response to the confession is to summarize Crime and Punishment : the secret criminal will be emotionally tormented and will finally confess. He gives the conventional answer, Dostoevsky's answer, fully consonant with the theology (Jewish or Christian--it doesn't matter) of the all seeing God.

And he is obviously wrong. As the murderer hugs his wife and leaves the party, and as the filmmaker character mulls over the Dostoevskian verities he has just spouted, the real filmmaker, the Woody Allen of the outside frame, forcefully rejects those verities, pumping yet another round into Holy Alyosha's jerking carcass. That's why it's a parody: same plot, different ending; same question, different answer--the meaning is inverted.

So where does that leave us? At the moment the score is God-- zip, truth--zip. Does this mean that, since a 20-20 God doesn't seem to exist, then "all things are lawful?" That question is implicit in Crime and Punishment and taken up explicitly in The Brothers Karamazov. Maybe Allen's next picture will be a Karamazov parody. But for the moment, that does not seem to be the moral outcome. By and large these characters are good citizens, comfortable in the moral framework inherited from the days of a deity who was not ophthamologically impaired. In fact the murder here is a lot "cleaner" than Dostoevsky's. In Balzac, where Dostoevsky got the idea, it was specified that the murderer would merely cause the death--no hands-on participation--and that the murder should produce demonstrable social benefit. Likewise here, the murder is actually arranged by a sort of diablo-ex-machina, as if by remote control, and it is done to save _career so public spirited it makes you want to gag. This filmscript is a carefully plotted philosophical test case.