First We Take Manhattan

This morning Cyrus is lecturing on Woody Allen’s Manhattan in our Writing New York class. It’s one of my favorite lectures of the semester — one of the real pleasures of team-teaching a course like this. Even better, sometimes, than getting to teach some of your favorite books or other cultural artifacts is getting to listen to someone else do it.

I’ve seen the Allen film probably a dozen times by now, but I really don’t ever get sick of it. For one, it’s interesting to return to it each spring with a group of new students — many of whom haven’t seen it before. (I know, it seems amazing! When I was in college one of the first rites of passage was finding the right group of people with whom you could rent — and then memorize and recite whole chunks of — Woody Allen’s oeuvre.)

One of my favorite viewings of the film, though, came not for the class but during a summer’s research trip to LA, when I went with a few friends to see it outdoors at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I wrote about that viewing elsewhere, if you want to read my whole take on the weird LA/NY tension that organized the evening, but for now I want to call out a moment near the end of my post when I misquoted some lines from the film’s ending. I wrote:

When he lectures on this movie, my team-teacher asks our students to consider what it means that the film ends where it does. Why go back to Tracy? What does it mean to make her the film’s moral center? What does it mean that she refuses to put off her London plans, that she delivers the final injunction to have a little faith in people (even as she acknowledges that everyone gets corrupted sometime)?

From my misremembering of Tracy’s line, I went on to speculate on how Tracy’s face aims to work for viewers:

Is the return to Tracy too easy, too predictable — a reaffirmation of traditionalist masculine fantasy in the face of things like the ERA (invoked in Bella Abzug’s MOMA fundraiser cameo)? Or can we take it seriously that Tracy’s face, which Allen’s camera has lovingly preserved for posterity (remember that scene when she cries? The size
of those tears!), belongs at the end of his index of things that make life worth living? Here’s the list in full, delivered by Isaac to his tape recorder/proxy therapist:

Well, all right, why is life worth living? That’s a very good question. Um. Well, there are certain things I — I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh, like what? Okay. Um, for me … oh, I would say … what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing … uh ummmm and Willie Mays, and um, uh, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and ummmm … Louie
Armstrong’s recording of “Potatohead Blues” … umm, Swedish movies, naturally … “Sentimental Education” by Flaubert … uh, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra … ummm, those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne … uh, the crabs at Sam Wo’s … tsch, uh, Tracy’s face …

Every one of these items reaffirms not only the film’s nostalgic tone, but more specifically its nostalgia for traditional masculinity, bodily pleasure, or male artistic prowess, even as they can be read more innocently as merely celebrating a range of human productions that do indeed counteract the universe’s terrifying problems. The film manages to convince its viewers of this second reading, at least if viewers like us, nestled among the graves of dead celebrities, can be taken as representative.

In the comments thread, my friend Wendy, with whom I’d gone to see the film, pointed out my mistake:

I believe Tracy’s last lines of the move are “Not everybody gets corrupted. You gotta have a little faith in people,” an idea which only reinforces Tracy’s role as the film’s moral center – and the hope that we all have that cities and lovers will be the same when we return to them, even though we know, really know that they won’t. The very act
of watching this movie, which won’t be corrupted – it will be the same every time we watch it, no matter where we see it – is one way for us to live Tracy’s last lines. In this sense the movie becomes our Tracy. That Diane Keaton will always say Van Gogh “Van Gawk” or that the soundtrack to fireworks over the Brooklyn Bridge will always
be Gershwin is a way for us to have a touchstone that is pure, that is faith-inspiring, no matter how your life has changed since the last time you saw it.

And another LA friend, Ruben, disputed my reading of the tape-recorder-therapy laundry list:

As for the famous list, I loved it as a younger person but it strikes me as more than a little self-aggrandizing now. I realize that part of the point is that it makes us consider what our own lists might look like but Woody veers dangerously close to those NYRB personal ads where the people define themselves by all the devastatingly perfect and culturally precise things they like to do and places they like to go. In his defense, I remember a specific joke of his about those ads, something along the lines of “Sensitive intellectual would like to get together for discussions of Kafka and sodomy.”

Granting that I’d gotten Tracy’s line wrong, was I right about the list? Or is Ruben right that it’s a pastiche of pseudo-intellectual cliches? I’d be interested in hearing how others — our students or other readers — understand the film’s final scenes.

p.s. Wendy, who’s written for a number of major television dramas, posted her own response to the film a week later. I responded to Ruben’s comment — though perhaps lamely — in the comments thread there. Isn’t the interweb magical? Behold its acts of historical preservation.

p.p.s. Speaking of ephemera: The film was shown on the side of Rudolph Valentino’s mausoleum. Not too long ago the blog Ephemeral New York posted on the actor’s 1926 funeral procession down Broadway.