Barry's Blog

"Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.  It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
-William Shakespeare, Macbeth

In Jennie Yabroff's interview with Woody Allen in the August 8th issue of Newsweek, "Take the Bananas and Run," the superstitious filmmaker admits to cutting his banana into seven slices each morning, as six slices, or eight, may lead to something terrible. "I know it would be total coincidence if I didn't slice it into seven pieces, and my family were killed in a fire," he offers. "I understand that there could be no correlation, but, you know, the guilt would be too much for me to bear, so it's easier for me to cut the stupid banana" (Allen also avoids haircuts while shooting a movie).

Despite such oddities that govern his daily regimen, Allen has spent a career using various genres in film that explore the seeming randomness and arbitrariness of our existence, or as he offers, "to live is to suffer." Yabroff suggests that "if there were a persistence-of-vision award for life philosophy, Allen would be a shoo-in." And while some might believe that the 72-year-old has mellowed over his years in filmmaking, akin to his latest film, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," a breezy romance with Javier Bardem ("No Country For Old Men" fame) and Scarlett Johansson, he seems to have remained resolute in his nihilistic worldview. Yabroff writes:

"But go to meet the director in hopes of a 'Tuesdays With Woody'-style affirmation of late-life contentment, and you will be quickly disabused of that illusion. At 72, he says he still lies awake at night, terrified of the void. He cannot reconcile his strident atheism with his superstition about the banana, but he knows why he makes movies: not because he has any grand statement to offer, but simply to take his mind off the existential horror of being alive. Movies are a great diversion, he says, 'because it's much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine.' "

While he was relaxed for the Newsweek interview at his production offices on Park Avenue, his polite and jovial demeanor should not be mistaken for his genuine take on life. Just as he explored the question of whether a man can get away with a heinous murder in his "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (reminiscent of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment"), so Allen takes it a step further in "Match Point," where the killer actually gets away with a brutal murder. So do we live in a moral universe or not? To Allen, this world is capricious, random, devoid of any true and lasting meaning. Allen admits that the indifference of the universe has obsessed him since he was a child. "My mother always said I was a very cheerful kid until I was 5 years old, and then I turned gloomy."

Allen himself can only attribute that shift to an awareness of death, which he claims to remember from the crib. "Now, maybe I stayed in the crib longer than other kids," he adds.  And as Yabroff writes, while there seems to be '"that little spark of wryness, suggesting that the nihilism is just shtik, it soon becomes apparent that when he says he agrees with Sophocles' suggestion that to never have been born may be the greatest boon, he means it. He is, however, cautious not to infect his loved ones with his pessimism. 'I don't prattle on about this at all to my daughters,' he says. 'I bend over backwards to be very positive and not in any way express this to them.'"

Death may be particularly on Allen's mind at the moment since Ingmar Bergman, to whom he credits so much of his own filmmaking, died while he was shooting "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," as did director Michelangelo Antonioni. Allen offers, "Your perception of time changes as you get older, because you see how brief everything is," he says. "You see how meaningless ... I don't want to depress you, but it's a meaningless little flicker." The great Christian apologist Blaise Pascal would agree with Allen, as he once observed that "anyone who does not see the vanity of life must be very vain indeed!"

I know some of you might wonder why I would devote time to someone like Woody Allen, who exemplifies such a depressing and nihilistic worldview. But I would submit that we cannot be too thankful for the great atheists, for they show us the shape of God by His absence more clearly and starkly than believers do by His presence. In many ways, these works, devoid of God, represent a silhouette, in that they show us the need for God in a seemingly Godforsaken world. We only witness the bright beauty of precious jewels when we have a black cloth behind them.

In many ways, Allen's work is reminiscent of Qoheleth, the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, who instructs us that "all is vanity and a striving after wind." Or, as philosopher Peter Kreeft has observed, "life is like a wild goose chase, but in the end, there is no goose!"  And if we should have a problem with Qoheleth's statement, or for that matter the entire book of Ecclesiastes, then perhaps we should ask ourselves, why is this book in the Bible in the first place?

So filmmakers like Allen, especially In our post-Christian culture, may very well serve a redemptive purpose in that they paint the need in our world for a just and moral universe, and where a life lived without facing its absurdities would be a life lived in denial. Thomas Merton would have applauded Allen's work. He once observed that:

"It is only when the apparent absurdity of life is faced in all truth that faith really becomes possible. Otherwise, faith tends to be a kind of diversion, a spiritual amusement, in which one gathers up accepted, conventional formulas and arranges them in the approved mental patterns, without bothering to investigate their meaning, or asking if they have any practical consequences in one's life."

Woody Allen once stated, perhaps to the religiously inclined, "To you I am the enemy, but to God, I am the loyal opposition."