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Book Review: Reconstructing Woody
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Mary Nichols, Reconstructing Woody: Art, Love, and Life in the Films of Woody
Allen. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998, 253 pp., $21.95 paper.
N ATALIE
E LLIOT
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS
ne0017@unt.edu
It may seem strange for a political philosophy professor to
undertake an extensive interpretation of Woody Allen’s films. Why, one might
wonder, would a scholar versed in the writings of the greatest philosophers and
dramatists opt to dedicate a book-length project to the works of a contemporary
filmmaker—a mere celebrity, as might be said? In the opening pages of her
book, Mary Nichols explains that Reconstructing Woody: Art, Love, and Life in
the Films of Woody Allen began when she recognized in Allen’s comedy a glimmer
of insight reminiscent of the ancient comedian Aristophanes. Nichols
noticed that Allen, in his Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, like Aristophanes, in
his Clouds, saw fit to render ridiculous an empiricist professor who derives his
views from an absurdly narrow basis of observable phenomena. After making
this observation, Nichols decided to draw Allen’s comic insight to the attention
of her graduate students, with whom she discussed his films over a series of
movie nights. Her book might thus be said to derive from admiration for a
filmmaker who can provide insight into perennial problems in their modern
manifestations, and the recognition that such insight can be particularly helpful
for bringing these problems to light to modern students.
But does Allen actually provide such insight? Do Allen’s films
illuminate modernity in a manner that is worthy of such attention? Nichols
argues against several of Allen’s critics and says that they do. Generally speaking,
her book is an account of Allen as a moral comic: as a filmmaker whose
comedy successfully makes us laugh in a manner that also makes us think; and
as a humorist whose works can provide society with a moral and intellectual
education (xiv).
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