Woody Allen’s style and themes in his films has changed many times over the 30 years that he has been writing and directing. He covers issues such as politics and relationships using a variety of styles, all of them including humor. Allen is involved in politics and he would not allow his films to be shown in South Africa in 1986, protesting Apartheid. In his movies, he ventures into the political arena with 1971’s Bananas. Allen has also has a string of relationships, and every one of his movies shows a different and humorous view of relationships between men and women. However, some of his movies have a more serious undertone and talk about the thing that Allen is most, an artist. As a director, he has been nominated for 6 Academy Awards and won once for Annie Hall. Allen is an artist; he acts, writes, directs and plays the clarinet. He knows enough about artists to make a comment on them in his films. Allen shows in some of his films that some artists can’t tell the difference between reality and their art and try to use their art as an alternate life.
In Deconstructing Harry Allen plays Harry Block, a writer whose life has never been in control. He’s gone through three wives, at least one long-term lover and thousands of whores. In short, his life is hell. And he even knows the devil as played by Billy Crystal. He cannot function in the real world. He always says the wrong things to women, the mother of his only child won’t let the child see him, and one of his only friends thinks he’s having a heart attack. Nothing ever turns out the way it should. So Harry turns to his art, writing. His stories mirror his life. Harry can see what he did to ruin all of his relationships and can fix them, at least in his novels. However, he doesn’t learn from his art, says John Bickley in his essay Art Devours Life in Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry. When his fictional alter ego shows up and gives him advice, he ignores it. He has convinced himself and others that the people in his books are not himself and his friends, but entirely fictional characters.
Deconstructing Harry is said to be Allen’s bitterest film about art. He shows the dark side of art and what life can become if you loose the thin wall between reality and art, or what can happen if the wall is too strong. Harry refuses to admit that the people he writes about are people in his life; he has erected an impenetrable wall between reality and art in that sense. When Harry is talking with the committee that set up the honoring award at his old college, one of the students asks whom the main character in one of his novels is. Harry admits that it is himself, and Bickley says that with that admission, Harry can now learn from his past mistakes and really see the connection between his life and his art.
Another way Allen shows artists being out of touch with reality is with a short story that Harry writes. It’s about an actor who suddenly becomes out of focus, literally. It gets worse and worse until finally his family can’t look at him without getting a headache. The story’s resolutions comes with the actor’s family getting glasses so they can see the actor, and get him back into focus, back into the world of reality. Harry becomes out of focus later in the film, and although he comes back into focus a few minutes later, Allen is trying to show the viewer that artists can get so out of touch with the real world that they can seem out of focus and not here. He’s also saying that the artist can’t fix his problem, the people around him have to help. The reason Harry comes back into focus is Cookie (his whore of the moment) calms him down. In the story, the family sacrifices something so they can see the actor. In both cases, people close to the artist have to do something so the artist can semi-function in normal life again.
In Deconstructing Harry Billy Crystal plays Harry’s “friend” Larry, who is stealing Harry’s girl of the moment, Fay (played by Elizabeth Shue). At one point in the movie Larry tells Harry, “I will never be the writer that you are. I know that. You put your art into your work, I put it into my life.” But what Larry doesn’t realize is that Harry’s art is his life. He tries to make things right in his books, or at least portray things the way he wants them to be portrayed. Harry can’t function in real life so he functions in his novels.
In Stardust Memories Allen plays Sandy Bates, a filmmaker who, like Allen, is known for his humorous films. His life and relationships never seem to work out either, though not to the extent of Harry’s problems in Deconstructing Harry. His two main lovers in the movie are Dorrie and Isobel. Dorrie is basically insane; as Bates once says she “could be great two days a month, but the other twenty-eight…” Isobel on the other hand is a sweet French woman who has a couple of kids. Bates drops Dorrie (or she drops him) before the movie starts, but throughout the move there are several flashbacks to his time with her. In many ways, it seem like he still wants to be with her, but can’t.
In one of Bates movies that is shown at the film festival where Stardust Memories takes place, Bates says something that really relates to his inability to let Dorrie go. Bates is playing a mad scientist and he’s explaining his project to another scientists. He says “But you know, I've never been able to fall in love. I've never been able to find the perfect woman. There's always something wrong. And then I met Doris. A wonderful woman. Great personality. But for some reason, I'm just not turned on sexually by her. Don't ask me why. And then I met Rita. An animal. Nasty, mean, trouble. And I love going to bed with her. Though afterward I always wished that I was back with Doris. And then, I thought to myself, if only I could put Doris's brain in Rita's body. Wouldn't that be wonderful? And I though, Why not? What the hell, I'm a surgeon. . . So, I performed the operation and everything went perfectly. I switched their personalities and I took all the badness and put it over there. And I made Rita into a warm, wonderful, charming, sexy, sweet, giving, mature woman. And then I fell in love with Doris.” Allen shows with this that when an artist is having conflict in his (or her) love life, they may turn to their art to see how either relationship would turn out. Allen is also giving the viewer a glimpse into Bates’s character and his relationship complexes.
Both Deconstructing Harry and Stardust Memories are about controlling your life through controlling your art. In Stardust Memories Sandy Bates says, “You can’t control life. It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only-only art you can control.” But in order to control your art, you must be able to control your life, suggests Mary P. Nichols who wrote Deconstructing Woody. Allen is saying that in order to control your life, you must control your art, but also, in order to control your art, you must control your life. The two depend on each other in so many ways. If you can’t control your life, something will go wrong in your art. Sandy Bates feels like his life is going out of control, and the studio doesn’t like his new movie, they want his “earlier, funnier movies”. One of Harry Block’s ex-lovers comes and tries to kill him, and he has writers block. Art and life depend on each other.
Technically, Allen does a superb job of showing the viewer the artist’s conflict in differentiating reality from art. In Allen’s earlier movies, such as Banana’s and Take the Money and Run, the sequencing of the film was in a natural, easy to understand way. Allen has always used flashbacks, but in most of his movies, they are introduced as flashbacks by whoever’s narrating the film. In Deconstructing Harry, Allen puts scenes from Harry’s books into the movie. Many times it is difficult to tell whether what you are seeing is Harry’s life or one of his stories. Harry also has this problem, since the books are usually based on his life. In the beginning of Deconstructing Harry it is easier to tell what is Harry’s life and what is his art because in his novels, different people play Harry. But by the end of the movie Harry is playing himself in his novels and it is impossible to tell if you’re watching a bit of Harry’s life, or a bit of his novel.
In Stardust Memories, Allen combines bits of Bates films into the main movie. The bits of film usually help to illustrate a point that Allen is making about the character, Bates inability to deal with women for an example. The main technical achievement with this film is the ending. As Peter J. Bailey says in The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen “We (the audience) thinks we’re released from the spiraling, self-conscious obliquities of this movie by a genetic boy-commits-himself-to-girl finish anyone can understand!” However, the ending shows the audience that the whole movie was actually a movie and the ultimate connection between reality and art had been lost. The “actors” who played Dorrie and Isobel compare notes on how Bates kissed them and spectators of the film comment on its style and the themes of the movie. The viewer is left with confusion, what is real and what is not? What is art and what is life? In a way, Allen is giving us a real sense of what his artists are feeling, the confusion between art and reality.
Both movies take place in the same situation, an honoring festival of some sort. In Deconstructing Harry, Harry is being honored by the college that threw him out, and in Stardust Memories, Sandy is being honored by, what he sees as, random people. Neither Harry nor Sandy really wants or feels the need to be honored by people they don’t know or have any connection with. They want to be honored by the people in their life, the people in their art. Harry gets his wish at the end when all of his characters come to honor him in his apartment. In Stardust Memories, it’s a little hard to tell if Sandy gets honored in the way he wishes to, since the movie ends on such an odd note.
Economically, neither of these films did that well. Stardust Memories was just over the break-even line world wide, and although I couldn’t find any statistics on Deconstructing Harry, I remember that it didn’t do so well. Allen predicted that people wouldn’t want to see movies about art and artists and even made fun of it in Stardust Memories. Viewers at the film festival are constantly telling Bates how much they loved his “early, funny films” and the studio doesn’t want to release his new film because it’s not humorous. Many people didn’t want to see Stardust Memories and Deconstructing Harry because they’re not funny, at least not in an obvious way. When I told my dad which films I was watching, he said “Oh, the boring, non-funny ones.” This response to artist’s work is shown well in Stardust Memories.
Although Allen claims that none of the main characters in his movies are actually him, Stardust Memories and Deconstructing Harry are so close to his life, it’s almost ridiculous to say that Allen’s not a bit of Harry or Sandy. This goes along with Allen’s point about artists not being able to see the difference between art and life. In Stardust Memories, at the film festival fans of Bates always go up to him and tell him how much they loved his “earlier funny films”. Many people have said to Allen how much they love his early, slapstick movies like Take the Money and Run and Sleeper. Sandy Bates attitude to women, the fact that he can’t find the perfect woman might mirror Allen’s attitude. Allen has certainly gone through enough women to make this fact instead of fiction. Allen may be trying to see how some of his relationships might end up in Stardust Memories.
In Deconstructing Harry, Harry won’t, or can’t, admit that he’s showing his life in his books. This could be Allen telling all his fans that he’s really all of his characters, but he won’t actually admit it. Admitting that you are your characters would be a hard thing for famous artists to do, people who are fans will know all about your life without really knowing you. In the end of Deconstructing Harry, Harry admits that he’s the main character of all his novels and that is a cathartic experience for him. In making Deconstructing Harry Allen is having his own therapeutic experience without actually having to get up in front of a bunch of people and saying, “Yes, I am Alvy from Annie Hall and I am Sandy Bates from Stardust Memories and I am Harry Block.” By admitting this fact even in the round about way that Allen does it, he is showing that he is beginning to tell the difference between art and reality.
Allen also talks about the fan/artist relationship in Stardust Memories and even in Deconstructing Harry. In Stardust Memories Allen is exploring something in his art that has never happened to him min real life, a fan trying to kill him. He also plays around with the adoration that artists experience. In …But We Need the Eggs, Diane Jacobs says that people when watching Stardust Memories will think that Allen hates his fans, but in reality he doesn’t. He’s just portraying something that he has never experienced and wants to experience which is why he does it in his art. When a fan comes up to Bates and tells him that he’s the man’s favorite director and then shoots him, Allen is showing a complex part of the fan/artist relationship. Shortly after Stardust Memories opened, John Lennon was killed by a fan showing the world that what Allen is talking about could actually happen. In Deconstructing Harry, Allen shows what happens when an artist finally accepts that people want to honor him, or her. In some ways, Allen may have a fear of being honored. He has never shown up at an Academy Awards, even when he won. He chooses to play his clarinet with his band instead. Harry doesn’t want to go to the honoring ceremony at his old college and in fact doesn’t really go, he goes to jail, but at the end he accepts praise from his characters, in reality, himself. Allen is in a way praising himself when he praises Harry, once again, blurring the line between art and reality.
In Stardust Memories and Deconstructing Harry Woody Allen is showing the viewer the thin line between art and reality that exists for artists and how some artists can’t tell the difference between art and reality and the way that artists live alternative lives in their art. Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories shows how relationship problems can be seen in a clearer way through film and also takes the viewer into the fan/artist relationship. Harry Block in Deconstructing Harry is the embodiment of an artist living in denial to the fact that they put themselves in their art. Both Harry and Sandy have bits of Allen himself in the, showing that even Allen sometimes has problems telling the difference between art and reality.
Art vs Reality: Artists in Woody Allen's Films © Elizabeth Frommer. Do not distribute without permission