WOODY ALLEN: ILLUSION & REALITY
Adams, William
Cecelia sits alone in the middle of the nearly empty theater. She is wearing her old brown coat and matching hat. She holds a small bag of popcorn which she pecks at in a distracted way. But...
...Tom Baxter, after all, makes up his own mind to leave the perfect fictional for the imperfect actual...
...The criticism of film, The Purple Rose of Cairo argues, half in earnest, half in jest, is therefore the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which movies are the halo...
...So instead Cecelia goes to a show...
...But despite the joke, the Marxist view of things, and of ideology in particular, is very close to what is being said at the core of The Purple Rose of Cairo...
...Gil Shepard, the actor who plays Tom, vain, superficial, and a liar...
...Cecelia goes home to pack her things...
...In a medium that is obsessively self-referential but rarely self-reflective, it is a serious and important message...
...As soon as Tom Baxter pops out of the screen like a grape bursting through its skin, the entire story turns around the meaning of the strange and often hilarious relationship between the imaginary world of films and the real world of daily life...
...The same glow returns to her eyes, and her mouth lifts in a rapturous smile...
...Cecelia is enthralled...
...He focuses instead on the final arc of the particular sort of distortion that goes on in film...
...By implication, there is something inherently unstable about such stories, quite apart from what the Raoul Hirsches of the world intend for them...
...The creation of illusions is thus an uncertain business...
...It is a statement intended to describe the disarray caused by Bax490 ter's rebellion, but it works just as well for the film's wider purposes...
...Tom Baxter, the young romantic hero, suddenly stops delivering his lines and looks right at Cecelia...
...It is as though the picture becomes more real each time she sees it...
...He is charming, overwhelmingly sincere...
...In the midst of the anarchy that Tom's defiance creates within the inner narrative, yet another bit character leaps onto the set and, in unmistakably Marxist—Leninist tones, urges his fellow characters to follow Tom's lead and throw off the oppressive yoke of narrative that shapes their lives...
...Behind all this, the seedy New Jersey town, the tenements, the movie house, the Great Depression, and a troupe of hilarious bit characters that wander in and out of the action...
...THAT IDEOLOGY IS THE CENTRAL PROBLEM of The Purple Rose of Cairo is hardly a secret stashed away in some obscure corner of the film...
...Cecelia protests: "You can't leave," she tells him, "you're in the movies...
...Bewildered, Cecelia gives in, and together they leave the theater...
...Even as it is distant and delusional, the imaginary world that is nightly offered up to Cecelia is also subversive, capable of suddenly casting aside its mystifying function and becoming a sketch of a different way of life...
...He is dismayed not so much by the idea of buying (or selling) sex as he is by what such an act would mean in terms of his feelings for Cecelia...
...But no, it is Cecelia...
...More accurately, the romantic comedies that Cecelia adores are never 491 simply diversions from her real situation and desires...
...I don't have to be a maitre d' anymore," shouts a bit character in the inner film when he learns that Tom Baxter has broken free of his character...
...But she is unprepared for what happens in the middle of the fourth...
...Similarly, things cannot go on as before if Cecelia, and all the Cecelias of the world, refuse their parts...
...For the great majority of the characters in the film, getting that relationship right means getting Tom Baxter back into the movie where he belongs...
...But the story also implies that we prefer even our own fantasies straight up, as mere distractions that do not bother us with the business of becoming real...
...But it is also a film about a complex, and much less comic, idea...
...Mistaking the real for the illusory, she will always fall for Gil Shepard, and never get away from Monk...
...Her eyes are pinned to the screen, as if she were witnessing a continuous miracle...
...The imaginary to which Cecelia flees in order to forget her poverty and her husband (the Copacabana, "penthouses, the desert, kissing on the dance floor") blurs both what she is fleeing from and what she must do and imagine if things are to be different for her...
...There may be no mystification without the imaginary, but neither is there anything else, including the freedom that she so fervently desires...
...For the same reason, a future in which Cecelia's desires are realized must be a future she has at one time envisioned...
...The real audience begins to complain and argue too...
...They are somehow real in the very substance and moment of those illusions...
...That is easy to understand when other people's imaginations threaten what we have...
...What happens in the interrupted, film-withinthefilm in The Purple Rose of Cairo is thus a model for what might happen in the real world as soon as the imaginary ceases to be merely imaginary...
...But in the end they are genuinely moved by his sincerity and naivete, enough to begin confessing to their own secret longings for romantic love and even children...
...She cannot face his anger and the questions about what they will do now that she has lost her job...
...He pitches pennies all day and comes home and drinks...
...This magical scene is one of the principal moments in The Purple Rose of Cairo, Woody Allen's recent film about life and the movies in a small town during the 1930s...
...They also manage to tell her something true about herself, and that is why they can grip her so hard in the first place...
...Tom Baxter must be gotten back into the film because imagination loosed from conventional forms is dangerously subversive...
...Tom's act of defiance may be miraculous, but it is not "the movies" and that, after all, is what we want...
...Films are our peculiar form of illusion, and what they obscure from our view is the truth of what we live...
...But it must also be the case that they are more than this...
...Not only are we caught in a world that requires illusions, but the ways in which we dream, imagine, fantasize only deepen our powerlessness...
...She decides not to go home because she is afraid of her husband Monk...
...But in her face there is absolute attention...
...You'll be back," he warns her...
...Instead, she enters the theater, where a new and presumably less troubling film is just under way...
...On the very edge of her freedom, Cecelia is thus betrayed by her own imagination, or more precisely by an imagination shaped by the movies...
...To stretch matters only a little, the real subject of this film is ideology...
...She turns to look behind her, thinking that he must be looking at someone else...
...ALAS FOR CECELIA, the imaginary is not evenly divided between liberating and illusionary impulses...
...As the rather somber conclusion of the film makes clear, her vision of something else—something beyond and better than Monk, the Depression, and her poverty—is fatally skewed...
...It suggests, quite obviously, that movies soften and obscure the existing pattern of social relationships by proposing fantastic and thoroughly symbolic solutions to the problems people live...
...She is bound on that account to misunderstand herself and her predicament in the long run...
...It is thus not simply the case that films touch upon the "real" in spite of the illusions they project...
...She has a steady, remarkable smile that registers her surprise and delight...
...The movies," it suggests, are at the same time mystifying illusions and powerful, subversive instances of imagination...
...it isn't done...
...When Cecelia learns of Gil's deceit, she does not return immediately to Monk, though we understand, as she does, that this is now inevitable...
...He represents the classical fantasy of romantic attachment that stalks about in everyone's life and permanently eludes us precisely because it is so unreal...
...She has seen this one before, but that does not matter...
...Coming to terms with how films work as cultural documents means coming to terms with the relationship between the "real ones" and the "fictions" they spin about themselves...
...I'm going to Hollywood...
...The theater manager worries about his future in a world where there are no institutionalized fictions, where the seam between the real and the imaginary is no longer fixed...
...Of course he is right...
...Like the inner story, the larger story, the social order itself, will have to come undone...
...Through Cecelia's unhappiness and obsession, Allen attempts to say something about how films work in our culture, about why and how they matter to us...
...Quite innocently, Tom is led to a whorehouse where, much to his dismay, he learns what prostitution is about...
...Cecelia raises her head and watches...
...I want what happened in the movie last week to happen this week," says one of the patrons...
...He was acting after all, playing to Cecelia's fantasies in order to get Tom Baxter back into the imaginary world...
...Cecelia, the movie fanatic...
...Gil Shepard, she learns at the movie theater, has left without her...
...When Tom Baxters in other theaters begin forgetting their lines, Raoul Hirsch, the film's quintessential Hollywood producer, frets over the possibility of a mass revolt of fictional characters against their real producers...
...Suddenly lacking a crucial player, the narrative structure of the film-within-a-film comes unhinged...
...Characters just can't walk out of movies, as everyone reminds Tom...
...His eloquent (and intensely romantic) defense of romantic love at first amuses the whores who have gathered about him...
...Is illusion, in other words, the creation of a certain form of society, as Marx thought...
...And yet, at the same time, Tom's starry view of things is able to resurrect desires and longings the everyday world has forced underground...
...They must touch on the real and then suppress it...
...She agrees, and in her turn convinces Tom to reenter the movie and thus set the world right again...
...Cecelia has been fired...
...Cecelia sees what she wants through the imaginary world of film, but she sees it only indirectly, through a maze of false starts and illusory figures...
...The story of The Purple Rose of Cairo is the story of Cecelia's comic and painful obsession with the movies...
...The "real" Tom Baxter, that is, the actor Gil Shepard, also falls in love with Cecelia...
...The "true" or "real" that lies buried in the unreal is displayed throughout The Purple Rose of Cairo in the painful contrasts between Cecelia's grim circumstances and the happiness she discovers in the movie theater...
...It is true that night after night Cecelia constructs in the dark a fantasy life she will never have in fact, thus wasting, in a sense, her will and resistance...
...I've got a chance to change my life," she tells Monk...
...Yet it is evidently only half the message, and that is what's intriguing in Allen's vision...
...Over Tom's perfect love and pained objections, he convinces her to let go of the fictional character for the real human being...
...It is built around, evokes, and nourishes real and potent desires that might suddenly spring to life and demand to be satisfied...
...He too is unemployed...
...But what does this in turn suggest about film, or at least those films that Raoul Hirsch and his allies have a common interest in restoring to the dark safety of the movie theater...
...The characters wander about complaining and wondering what to do...
...Today she sits through four successive showings...
...Both the audience and Tom's fellow characters rebel when the fictional universe is disrupted by the real...
...More exactly, the ideological function of films that The Purple Rose 492 MOVIES continued from p. 492 of Cairo sets before us is one conceived primarily in terms of the problem of distortion...
...That is the problem with the production of illusions...
...Tom, the hero, perfectly virtuous, handsome...
...But suddenly Tom Baxter walks out of the screen and she begins to believe that things might be different...
...She is once again enthralled and unmistakably, if only momentarily, happy...
...Tom, after all, knows only what the script of romantic comedy tells him the world is like...
...But Tom explains that he has fallen in love with her and that he wants his freedom...
...As one exasperated bit character puts it, "the real ones want their lives to be fictions, and the fictional ones want their lives to be real...
...Monk pleads and rages...
...But it is also the theme of Tom Baxter's first encounter with a "real" person other than Cecelia: a prostitute who happens upon Tom in his hiding place (appropriately enough, in the local amusement park...
...She does not usually go to matinees, but today is different...
...It isn't done in part, the film suggests, because most of us feel a need for the imaginary to remain unreal, impossible...
...So in the end it is the illusory force of films that appears to have the upper hand...
...From the side of the imaginary and the fictive, Woody Allen sounds suddenly like Marx on the theme of religious illusion...
...This more complex but interesting state of affairs is both confirmed and clarified in the wider logic of the story...
...That thought disturbs Hirsch not only because it threatens "the movies" but, ultimately, the film implies, because it threatens the social order that supports this very special form of imaginary life...
...Woody Allen does not say...
...This isn't the movies, this is real life...
...Monk is happy to have Cecelia out of his hair on the nights she goes to the movies, but he is tormented by a suddenly living Tom who might deliver Cecelia from his domination...
...But then Fred Astaire begins to sing and to waltz Ginger Rogers across the floor...
...He takes her by the hand and asks her to go away with him...
...QUITE APPROPRIATELY, given his profession, Woody Allen finds such high seriousness amusing...
...The real danger is not only that other Tom Baxters will insist on becoming real but that Cecelia will forget her lines too, that she will demand to become what she dreams of being in her movie fantasies...
...It is a film built around a familiar but still enchanting assortment of Allen characters and motifs...
...She looks beaten and desperate...
...Tom Baxter then speaks to her, steps forward, and leaves the movie...
...and Monk, the gruff and unemployed husband who slaps Cecelia around and then reels her in with remorse and promises...
...In that case, Cecelia's fantasy life cannot be all waste and symbolic diversion...
...The world's desperation to get Tom Baxter back into the movie he has abandoned clearly suggests that traditional narratives (and their traditional separation between the imaginary and the real) are a conservative force in collective life...
...The point this scene makes is not that Tom's vision of love is real, and that the prostitutes' cynicism and pain are false...
...Illusions, it seems, are never just illusions...
...The image-maker, to borrow and transform another image from Marx, is a bit like the sorcerer's apprentice, conjuring up powers he cannot contain...
...Cecelia sits distracted, unable to grasp completely what has happened, but surely aware of the magnitude of her self-deception...
...Ever so slowly, her face softens...
...In the realm of the imaginary, The Purple Rose of Cairo suggests, things are never exclusively true or false...
...Is there an imaginary life without illusion, without distortion...
...From an accomplished comedian and filmmaker, this is a rather startling claim...
...There is, however, something more complicated than either self-interest or the habits of settled roles in this confinement of the imaginary to the unreal and unrealizable...
...For the imaginary to cease to be the imaginary, the real must cease to be the real...
...This, as understood in this work, is by no means a simple term...
...When he drinks he gets mean and smacks Cecelia—"when you get out of line," he says...
...Because they represent her desires in distorted form, the movies both tell Cecelia what she wants and forever prevent her from possessing it...
Vol. 32 • September 1985 • No. 4
