Treatment of Character in Recent Woody Allen Films

The three best Woody Allen films of the past decade or so, of the fourteen (!) he's directed since 2000, are by most measurements Match Point, Vicki Cristina Barcelona, and Blue Jasmine. Yes, Midnight in Paris was very popular and fun, but wasn't as serious of a film, nor, with its magical realism-driven plot, was it really intended to be.

What they all have in common is the fact that none of the lead characters in Match Point, Vicki Cristina Barcelona, or Blue Jasmine learn, grow, or change at the end of the film. This of course is contrary to what most writers and writing teachers would say about what makes "good drama"--characters are supposed to be challenged by the journey of the plot and change from the beginning to the end, otherwise there's "no story."

But the whole idea of being changed by anything is a bit hacky, and doesn't fit in with actual life. Who is more irritating than someone whose had a life-changing experience and consciously tries to act differently and live a different life? Change is one of the most impossible and overrated ideas out there--perhaps this is why we have demanded that it be a staple of all character-driven fiction, we have some perverse desire to believe in change and know that fiction is the only arena where it can be rendered somewhat convincingly. But people really don't change or learn things--one's internal monologue is more or less the same throughout one's life, and the way one reacts to things and engages with the environment stays fairly consistent. Experiences really mean little--what we bring to them far outweighs what they bring to us. Yet we tirelessly seek them out--why?

In Vicki Cristina Barcelona, this inertia of character is suggested, as Vicki and Cristina go on a whirlwind summer holiday in Barcelona that challenges their core ideas of who they are and what they want from life, but at the end of the film they are in exactly the same place they were before. The challenge is that they are both given an opportunity to get exactly what they think they want--Vicki gets a shot at escaping from her safe, predictable monogamous life with Doug, and Cristina gets a bohemian, creative, (pseudo)intellectual haven in which to test her (ultimately obtuse and facile) avant-garde ideas. Yet they ultimately choose to go back to who and what they were before Barcelona--even though they seem to have little idea of who and what that is, and even though they fled to Barcelona to escape their lives and "find themselves." So one's core self is necessarily held in low regard, yet it is ultimately what we retreat to because it is inescapable. We value experience more highly than anything, but it has negligible effects on us. This is the deep pessimism of Allen's recent serious work. At the end of the film, Vicki is safely marrying Doug and has her whole life more or less mapped out, and Cristina is confused and impulsive and lost amid her tedious notions of foggy avant-gardeism. They've learned nothing from their dramatic, romantic experiences.

Blue Jasmine spells this out more explicitly, as Jasmine/Jeannette begins the film by maniacally bearing her soul to a stranger on an airplane, who gets away from her as soon as possible, and ends it by seeking out a lone stranger minding her own business on a park bench and starts confiding in her like they were old friends. This is despite her best efforts to sincerely humble herself through menial labor, making herself vulnerable by getting deeply romantically involved with someone, taking a computer science course that was, for her at least, very challenging, and being kind to her simple, low-class sister who she's always regarded as beneath her. She couldn't have gone through a more dramatically different set of circumstances and couldn't have thrown herself into this attempt at starting over more deeply. And yet she is the exact same disaster of a person at the end of the film, because that's who she is. She learned nothing, she did not grow at all, and her experiences had no impact on her, other than giving her a new set of stories to spew at strangers she can somehow corner in public places.

What's exciting about this remarkably fruitful period in the almost 80 year old filmmaker's life is that his innate gifts for drawing believable characters have fused with an accurately pessimistic view of life, personhood, and character. We see fully formed, relatable characters in all of their inimitably Allen-esque luminescence, but they are consistently confronted with the inefficacy of their actions, the transience of experience, and the absurdity of life--which absurdity, it is becoming clear, is mainly that of deeply desiring change, yet being incapable of change.

Exploring Heisenberg, or, a Few Hundred Words about a Single, Freeze-framed Facial Expression

Breaking Bad is justly considered the greatest serial drama ever produced, I think, at least partly because it charts in such painstaking detail the acceptance of change as enacted through a human face. We see each detail of consciously choosing to do the wrong thing as enacted through a face that shows no regret. That's the thing about a face--it shows what the soul consists of, and souls are not half-formed things, but complete remnants of the choices and habits we engage in every hour.

People know what and who they are to a certain extent--if we did not have at least semi-workable/plausible narratives to operate according to, we would be complete nomads, incapable of holding a job or paying rent or doing anything that relies on a basic measure of steadiness. Telling ourselves something about ourselves every day is a basic human necessity, like food, water, air, and orgasm. A soul is a definitive expression of what the true being of a person is, and the face of that person fairly directly communicates this. To live is to make a choice every day and to be aware of this choice and to accept it.

I don't think that quite enough has been made of just how aware Walter White has been of his choices. The image above shows exactly this--he knows that he will have to kill Hank, and this has become part of his being to such an extent that there is no question at all in his mind that he will do it. It is a foregone conclusion, like gravity or the sun rising, that he will brutally murder anyone who threatens him in any way, as if he, Heisenberg/Walter White, the killer, has no choice in the matter, and the fact that he has no choice is not even big news to him.

What an impressive level of being it must be to not deliberate, but to know as fully as water knows which direction to flow what needs to be done, and to know fully well that it will be done, because you have done it before. This is the beautiful, admirable, enviable thing about Heisenberg, and about the resolute aspect of this facial expression.

But, of course, it is all in the service of evil--and the truly bad thing about joining this absolute, classical excellence, this Kierkegaardian purity of heart and singleness of willing, of being so in control of one's bodily and psychical resources that an emergent problem is pitied because of how completely you know it will be dealt with, with evil, is how it shows a fundamental ugliness of human nature--the kind of forceful purity attending singularity of purpose so perfectly displayed by Heisenberg here has perhaps no un-evil counterpart.

It is perhaps not impossible to attain the fullness of being displayed above in service of selflessness, charity, or some other manner of positive behavior--but it's unclear as of this writing how exactly it would result to the above pictured/described order of complete self-knowledge. Perhaps the real allure of becoming evil for Walter White was not love of harming others or of earning millions in a matter of weeks, but the cheap, shortcut access to self-knowledge and self-awareness. He is a fuller man than a genuinely good person like Hank could ever be--but is such fullness Icarian?