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Who is he really? To know him better will help his obsessions and through images. They are obvious: psychoanalysis, power, laughter, God, sex. Five experts recall his films and biasedly analyze him.
At eighty and a half, Woody Allen can’t cope with life. He has everything up to his neck — anxiety, women, despair from the fact that he was born red and short, and, of course, work. He edits a TV series, writes the script and just presented a new film at the Cannes Film Festival. Let’s get to know this director and writer better by exploring his films and books. Everything’s there. After all (although he likes to deny it), there are few famous people whose life would be as transparent as his.
His statements immediately become aphorisms, his characters are recognizable and close to us as relatives: psychoanalysts, freaks, authoritarian mothers, notorious women and depressed men. To understand the sympathy that he inspires in some, and the hostility that causes others, to unravel the secret of his supernatural performance and constant dissatisfaction with God, in whom he does not believe, it would be ideal to learn to read between the lines and look beyond the foreground. In a word: become a psychologist.
We turned to some of the best in the profession, who are also keenly interested in the phenomenon of the little Jew with big glasses. Our experts have selected favorite quotes from Woody Allen’s books and films to reflect on his passions, oddities, and attitudes. Welcome to the inner world of a genius neurotic.
Professor of Psychoanalysis
Philippe Grimbert, psychoanalyst and writer, author of The Family Secret (Phantom Press, 2009)
“Woody Allen is extremely accurate in showing what psychoanalysis is and how it works. He does not have the ambitious goal of ridding the patient of all symptoms, but he can teach them to see them not as a hindrance, but as a unique opportunity, and to use their energy. Obsessive states, paranoia, hypochondria — Woody Allen’s neurotic spectrum is wide. All this could shackle him, prevent him from acting, force him to put off all his affairs until tomorrow. But he, on the contrary, turned it into material for creativity. And I think this is the result of his psychoanalytic work.
Of course, psychology comes from him. But laughing at her is another way to undergo psychoanalysis. For example, when he says: “I gave up psychoanalysis when I noticed that my analyst got better,” he laughs, of course, but he also explains what transference is! Attraction and repulsion in half: this can be said about the relationship of any patient with his analyst.
“Of course, psychology comes from him. But laughing at her is another way to be psychoanalyzed.”
In addition, Woody Allen’s work can be seen as a series of dedications: to Bergman, Fellini and others, whom he considered the «fathers» of cinema. Film after film, he finds his place in order to get rid of their influence and create his own approach. But psychoanalysis is also aimed at this: to help get rid of everyone with whom we identify ourselves. Woody Allen went very far in his identifications to become … Woody Allen.
border explorer
Elena Ershova, clinical psychologist, sexologist, family therapist, employee of the Psychological Center «Easier».
“I think he’s always exploring boundaries. For example, those that separate the subject from the object and «to be» someone from «own» something. In «Match Point,» Chris is so caught up in the idea of keeping his family and status alive that he kills Nola, who he’s drawn to, because she threatens that stability. Chooses not to be the one who loves, but to have a high social status.
The boundaries of free will also interest Woody Allen. In The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, the characters become the targets of a hypnotist. He makes two detectives, a man and a woman, commit thefts and also fall in love with each other, although before that they showed a mutual dislike. Then it turns out that they are indeed in love, but only under the influence of an external force were they able to discover their true desires.
“Already the early film“ Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex ”shows that for Woody Allen himself there are no limits, he is ready to ask the most uncomfortable questions. His character speaks directly to the audience. And as an author, he does it all the time. His films are extraordinary. We are accustomed to films where the series of events (they met, a problem arose, it was resolved) ends in the same place where it arose — on the screen. And Woody Allen poses questions, the answers to which lie on «our» side of the screen. What will we choose: to be or to own? What drives us: “I want it to be like in a fairy tale” or the willingness to find and manifest our desires and thereby create life?
Melancholic humorist
Leonid Krol, business consultant, professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, director of the Incantico project and the Coaching and Training Workshop.
“Woody Allen is a neurotic playing a neurotic watching a neurotic. He turns it all into a mesmerizing vaudeville in which tragedy merges with melancholy and sprinkles with sparks of liberation — an escape, if not to happiness, then to freedom. He (in different images) walks along the tightrope, giving the viewer hope for failure, falling from the wire stretched by him, grimacing and hiding the glaring seriousness of the abyss that is life. He is 80, and he is just as slender, still hears and sees only what he wants. Growing up, he became younger and received more and more rights to himself.
Isn’t he «more normal» than many boring «normal» ones? Those who drag on themselves habits taken by no one knows to whom (certainly not to themselves) obligations. Maybe it’s time for us to free ourselves from our various «shoulds»? A happy loser, a successful klutz, he creates his own worlds — inventing or remembering, quoting or turning his true self inside out. And our imagination runs after it, jumping over the stripes of everyday life.
Atheist infatuated with God
Serge Hefez, psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist, specialist in family and couples therapy.
“He says that he is an atheist, but everything is much more complicated. He addresses God constantly, including with statements like this: “Do I believe in God? Yes, I have a hard time believing in my own existence!” (in the movie «Shadows and Fog»). You can see two images of God in the work of Woody Allen. There is a God vengeful, omnipotent and unknowable. He writes the tablets of the Law, and his terrible power is undeniable. But there is also an inner God, a constant interlocutor, who can be endlessly questioned and challenged, who can be questioned. Recall that the Jewish tradition consists in commenting on the Torah, rereading its texts, studying them from different angles. Divine revelation is again and again reinterpreted by man. Woody Allen fits into this quintessentially Jewish mindset: «We only have one God, and we don’t believe in that either.»
“He needs to think about God in order to speak and prove that he does not exist!”
He needs to think about God in order to speak and prove that he does not exist! What for? In order, in spite of everything, to keep at least a minimum of meaning in this crazy world. And he needs this interlocutor to calm his anxiety and project his existential questions onto him.
Even if he knows it won’t lead to anything. It is this ambiguity that Woody Allen’s humor lies in, and it is precisely this ambiguity that our polarized world so badly needs. In addition, laughing at God, he laughs at the absurdity of the human condition … But also at himself: being a famous and prolific «creator», he could easily mistake himself for God! Speaking about it with humor, he keeps his megalomaniac in check: if God created such an absurd world, then how can he consider himself a clever man?
Man boy
Catherine Blanc, psychoanalyst and sex therapist, author of books on female sexuality.
“Women are the main thing in his films, as well as in his life. His mother, from whom he made a caricature of a Jewish mother, his sister, who became his producer and protector, cousins - they all played a serious role in his life … By the way he recreates this female world in his films, you can see the charm of a little boy unusually enveloping femininity, among which he grew up … But did not this world at the same time become an environment that choked him and limited him to the role of a child so that he would not become a potential lover?
As for Woody’s marriage to his daughter, although he is not biologically and legally her father, it is an incest situation that cannot do without psychological consequences. It also suggests relationships with the women of his family — perhaps they made him feel both a child in care and an «object of desire.»
The absence of a father in his biography and work is striking. Did he really neglect his son? Or was it the women who prevented him from being around Woody? Or was it Woody who pushed him out to remain the only minion? The absence of a paternal figure raises questions, as do his untouchable male images: God and Freud.
Everything about him is reminiscent of a little boy: timidity, physique, and even the way he constantly asks: how and why — as if he cannot manage himself and give himself the freedom to try to find the answer.