Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation

9 0 Interpretation
Nichols makes this claim against those who characterize Allen
variously as a despairing nihilist, a groundless existentialist, and a vain, childish
and immoral artist—in life and filmmaking alike. She dedicates a large part of
her preface to dealing with the latter series of charges, which stem primarily
from the scandal surrounding Allen’s life (Allen’s exposed affair with his
adopted daughter, and alleged child molestation), and the reaction to his film
Deconstructing Harry, which, on account of its ostensibly self-exculpatory
character, generated a barrage of criticism against the filmmaker. Nichols’
account of Allen’s scandal in relation to Deconstructing Harry provides a
unique variation on the approach of the book’s remaining chapters. Aside from
the first and the final chapters (in which Nichols explores, respectively, the
problem of interpretation, and the nature of comedy in general), the book is a
meditation on the moral teaching that can be found within twelve of Allen’s
films, and each film and its teaching are understood as a variation on the theme
of art in relation to life. The preface, in contrast, takes up the controversy surrounding
Allen himself, in relation to his art, along with the problem of
judging the art by the actions of the man.
Nichols contends that in general it is the artist’s works, as
opposed to the ephemera of the man and his scandal, that will persist, and
for that reason it is on these that our attention should focus. In making this
claim, Nichols takes on a difficult task; for it is the widespread allegation that
Allen deliberately draws attention to his own life in a self-justifying way—or
seems to anyway—which makes for much of the controversy surrounding
Deconstructing Harry. To exonerate Allen from these charges, Nichols argues
that at the core of Deconstructing Harry is a joke played on those who would
mistakenly conflate biography and fiction, the man and his creation, life and
art. According to Nichols,“Allen has given his most vociferous critics, who confuse
his art with this life and judge both harshly, a version of the despicable
person they imagine that he is. He holds out bait, and critics bite, identifying
Allen with Harry and seeing their opinions confirmed” (x). But whereas the
fictional Harry makes the mistake of writing a book that is only “thinly disguised
life,” Allen himself, according to Nichols, shows this mistake to be a
moral liability, and indicates this to his audience by having one of the people in
the film, on whom Harry’s own fictional characters are based, threaten to kill
him. Thus Nichols concludes that Allen is not guilty of the charge of trying to
justify his own perhaps thinly veiled life in his film; rather, he uses the similarities
between the film and his life to poke fun at those who would probe into his
life in the first place. “Making private matters public, one of Harry’s sins,