There is a long interview in last week’s Observer with Woody Allen by Carole Cadwalladr. The reviews of his latest film are so bad that I don’t think I’ll bother seeing it (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger). [Warning: Minor plot spoilers follow]
One of the themes that comes up in the interview, yet again, is Allen’s atheism. I’ve always admired his honesty, and the way he won’t sidestep the starkness implicit in a Godless universe, he won’t offer any facile consolations. Here are his latest reflections, framed by Cadwalladr’s comments:
They are all here [in the film], the familiar subjects of Allen-esque despair. The feeling, as Alvy Singer explains at the beginning of Annie Hall, that life is nasty, brutish and cruel. But also too short. That death dominates life. And that nothing works out, ever. It’s not a film a young man could have made. “No. I wouldn’t have thought of it when I was young. It requires years of disillusionment, this is true,” he says. The only happy characters in the film are the deluded ones, and the more powerfully deluded they are, the happier they seem. Helena, who takes up with a fortune teller and dabbles with the occult, is grinning like a loon by the end of the film.
“But then I’ve always felt that if the delusion works, it’s great. I always think that people who have religious faith are always happier than people who do not. The problem is that it’s not something you can adopt. It has to come naturally.”
There’s a brilliant sequence, which afterwards I think is the possibly the least romantic moment in any film ever, in which Sally, played by Naomi Watts, young, beautiful and trapped in an unhappy marriage, has a moment with her sexy, Spanish boss, Antonio Banderas. He obviously has feelings for her, as she does for him, and if she were a character in any other film, they’d eventually be together. Or maybe apart, but in a doomed, romantic way. Not here, though. It just doesn’t happen, and they end up not together in the most banal of ways: the timing’s off. She hesitates, and he falls in love with her friend instead. She takes consolation in her career but then that’s thwarted too. It’s a level of realism, the everyday realism of everyday life, that rarely reaches the screen.
In Woody Allen’s universe there is no reason why some things happen and others not. His atheism allows no delusions of that kind, but what about age, I ask him? Do you, like Alfie, resist hearing that you’re old?
“I do, I resist. I feel the only way you can get through life is distraction. And you can distract yourself in a million different ways, from turning on the television set and seeing who wins the meaningless soccer game, to going to the movies or listening to music. They’re tricks that I’ve done and that many people do. You create problems in your life and it seems to the outside observer that you are self-destructive and it’s foolish. But you’re creating them because they’re not mortal problems. They are problems that can be solved, or they can’t be solved, and they’re a little painful, perhaps, but they are not going to take your life away.”
“Life is so much luck. And people are so frightened to admit that. They want to think that they control their life. They think ‘I make my luck’. And you want to keep telling yourself that you’re in control, but you’re not in control. Ninety-nine per cent of it is luck, the luck of the genes, the luck of the draw, what happens during the day, the bomb that goes off on the other guy’s bus.”
When I read things like this It amazes me how having no faith and having strong faith can be so closely and intimately related. So full of parallel Truths, all but the flick of a switch.
The switch which allows you to glimpse the unexplainable beauty of things.
What Woody Allen says about people of faith being happier is probably true, in the same way that children are never happier then when they believe in Santa Claus. Once they figure out there isn’t a Santa Claus they are never as happy again. Faith is exactly like that. Once you realize that there is no god, you may not be as happy.. but you do become more interested in making the most of the precious life that we have. People and concern for protecting the earth from exploitation become much more important. One reason why I suppose that the wealthy and greedy promote religion as a distraction for the masses.
Wayne challenging your theory, I am most absolutely not wealthy, neither am I greedy, well maybe just a little for newborns.
I had a secular childhood and adulthood. Often I wish any religion would go away and leave me right alone. Even when and where I have denied God access to my life He has still infused it, even when I haven’t wanted it infused.
At times this has brought me far greater unhappiness, than before I was aware of His presence. A ridiculous inconvenient catastrophic upheaval.
But I know of Love eternal which seems to come with both loosing those we Love in death, in making new life, in giving birth to that life and in deepest Love. I have tangibly felt Gods presence unexpectedly at these times of heightened awareness (without seeking it)
Looking back to before these experiences, Ignorance with hindsight was bliss. God’s plan unfolds and whether we are happy or not appears to be irrelevant. But once He is inside everything else over than authentic Love becomes synthetic.
p.s I never believed in Santa Clause, I was a lucky one, for me it was Father Christmas, St Nic all the way!
‘other than authentic Love’