Woody Allen and Walter Benjamin walk into Elain's Restaurant…
.@NeinQuarterly We like to think he’s in New York having tête-à-têtes w/ Woody Allen—luckily there’s book for that → http://t.co/iY4DUg6Fzb
— Stanford Press (@stanfordpress) April 3, 2015
The following is an excerpt from David Kishik’s The Manhattan Project: Theory of A City.
We publish here a transcript of an interview with Allan Stewart Konigsberg (aka Woody Allen), conducted by Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (aka Carl Roseman), which took place in 1985. Sandor Needleman, a retired Columbia University professor who arranged the meeting and took these notes, stipulated that they should be “published posthumously or after his death, whichever comes first.”
WALTER: Most people think about Manhattan the film as your love letter to Manhattan the place. I disagree. For me it is a declaration of war. What was on your mind when you made it?
WOODY: You’re right. I said before that I wrote the script while thinking about what is happening to American culture, where relationships between human beings are becoming harder and harder to have, and it is becoming harder and harder to be honest and not to sell out. New York has to fight every day for its survival against the encroachment of all this terrible ugliness that is gradually overcoming all the big cities in America. This ugliness comes from a culture that has no spiritual center, a culture that has money and education but no sense of being at peace with the world, no sense of purpose in life.
WALTER: Do you consider your art in redemptive terms? Is this your way of fighting this empty entertainment machine, this culture industry, which distracts us from facing a philosophical problem like the meaning of life?
WOODY: Not really. I hate when art becomes a religion. I feel the opposite. When you start putting a higher value on works of art than on people, you’re forfeiting your humanity. To answer your second question, art to me has always been no more than entertainment for intellectuals, or pseudointellectuals. Mozart or Rembrandt or Shakespeare are entertainers on a very, very high level. But at bottom it is still meant to distract us from life, which is either miserable or horrible.
WALTER: In Stardust Memories the choice is between the train that you are trapped in, which is full of sickly, grim-looking individuals, and a second train, where beautiful, well-dressed people are having a party. As you are fighting to escape your gloomy train and join the celebration on the other one, both reach their final destination: a garbage dump, a landfill site.
WOODY: Yes, life is a lose-lose situation.
WALTER: And then you die alone.
WOODY: Well, there are worse things than death. Many of them playing at a theater near you.
WALTER: But even if there is no afterlife, you can still achieve immortality through your work. Imagine people watching a film you made or reading a book I wrote long after we are both dead.
WOODY: Rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow man, I’d prefer to live on in my apartment.
WALTER: So this is the best of all possible worlds.
WOODY: It’s certainly the most expensive.
WALTER: Then explain to me how being a comedian fits into this despairing condition of living without feathers, which is your rejoinder to Emily Dickinson’s “hope is the thing with feathers”?
WOODY: The way I see it, there is nothing really redeeming about tragedy. Tragedy is tragic, and it’s so painful that people try to twist it and say “it’s terribly hard, but look, we’ve learned something.” This is a weak attempt to find some kind of meaning in tragedy. But there is no meaning. There is no upside. Suffering does not redeem anything; there is no positive message to learn from it. The argument can therefore be made that the comic filmmaker or playwright is doing a better service to humanity than the tragic one. In the end the comic is helping you more, you’re okay for a little while longer.
WALTER: In this sense you seem very much like an inverted Kafka. I’m also reminded here of Nietzsche’s claim that the only enemies who can harm the ascetic ideal are its comedians.
WOODY: Every event first appears as tragedy and then as farce. I’m interested in the latter, in this comedy of errors.
WALTER: I once read a humorous piece in the New Yorker, not by you—it was actually published a decade before you were even born—about a visit by Plato to twentieth-century Manhattan. He is dismayed by the complete chaos, so he asks a passerby where one can still find hope and happiness, and the answer is: go to the movies.
WOODY: Like many Americans of my generation, watching so many films while growing up in Brooklyn led me to escape to fantasy and resent reality. Even today I see many people around me who are unable to shake off this attitude. They are still trying to write scenes into their own lives.
WALTER: But you escaped into a life in the cinema on the other side of the camera rather than the audience side of it. It’s not the audience that escapes—it’s you!
WOODY: That’s because I never felt truth was beauty. Never. I’ve always felt that people can’t take too much reality. I like being in Ingmar Bergman’s world. Or in Louis Armstrong’s world. Or in the world of the New York Knicks. Because it’s not this world. You don’t spend your whole life looking for the truth. You spend your whole life searching for a way out. Otherwise you just get an overdose of reality.
WALTER: We all know the same truth, and our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.
WOODY: The point for me is that, unfortunately, we must choose reality, but in the end it crushes us and disappoints. I hate reality, but it’s the only place where you can get a good steak dinner.
WALTER: But don’t you think that your films owe something to the real New York?
WOODY: In some sense they do, but in another sense they don’t. I’m always known as a New York filmmaker who eschews Hollywood and in fact denigrates it. No one sees that the New York I show is the New York I know only from Hollywood films that I grew up on. The New York that Hollywood showed the world, which never really existed, is the New York that I show the world because that’s the New York I fell in love with. In this sense, I feel I owe very little to reality.
WALTER: You create a phantasmagoria of New York that only a fool will confuse with the real thing. Still, as you show in The Purple Rose of Cairo, the living want their lives to be fiction, and the fictive characters want their lives to be real.
WOODY: Let me put it this way. Almost all my work is autobiographical and yet so exaggerated and distorted it reads to me like fiction.
Read more on The Manhattan Project »
Comments