\n\n\n\nEvery time Woody Allen is back in the news, I revisit that 1979 Joan Didion piece in which she demolishes the prevailing perception that his films are made for an intellectual class; that rather they\u2019re the essence of a Fake Deep, referential comedy made for men like Allen to mistake their insecurities for wisdom:
\n\n\n\u201cThis notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career\u2014something to work at, work on, \u201cmake an effort\u201d for and subject to an hour a day of emotional Nautilus training, all in the interests not of attaining grace but of improving one\u2019s \u201crelationships\u201d\u2014is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not inhabited entirely by adolescents. In fact the paradigm for the action in these recent Woody Allen movies is high school. The characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall andInteriors are, with one exception, presented as adults, as sentient men and women in the most productive years of their lives, but their concerns and conversations are those of clever children, \u201cclass brains,\u201d acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life.
\n\u2026These are not possible constructions, but they reflect exactly the false and desperate knowingness of the smartest kid in the class. \u201cWhen it comes to relationships with women I\u2019m the winner of the August Strindberg Award,\u201d the Woody Allen character tells us in Manhattan; later, in a frequently quoted and admired line, he says, to Diane Keaton, \u201cI\u2019ve never had a relationship with a woman that lasted longer than the one between Hitler and Eva Braun.\u201d These lines are meaningless, and not funny: they are simply \u201creferences,\u201d the way Harvey and Jack and Anjelica and A Sentimental Education are references, smart talk meant to convey the message that the speaker knows his way around Lit and History, not to mention Show Biz.\u201d
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vicious.