Woody and “Woody”: The Making of a Persona

Abstract

Do you know this one? Woody Allen always plays himself in his films. Yet what may have been a popular joke once has by now arguably turned stale. Sadly, the dubious conflation of man and work is not the exclusive domain of tabloid publications, though they have contributed a lot to it—especially in the early 1980s, following the release of the first batch of films which would later be recognized as the dawn of Allen’s mature period. John Lahr (interviewing Allen for The New Yorker) took the director’s choice of Felix Mendelssohn’s Wedding March in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) as confirmation that Allen was about to get married to Mia Farrow (65); other journalists employed the clichéd trope of the sad clown in order to reveal the “real” Woody Allen (cf. Kelley). In spite of Allen’s own frequent denial that his plots and his characters mirror his own life (cf. Lax 52–53; Matloff 142), it is not only journalists and fans who insist that he always “plays a version of himself” (Klein 88). It is the same logic that the fanatic mob applies in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979): “Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.” Thus Allen—so the argument goes—may be opting to play coy, but in truth he is winking at us and spurring us on.