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

9 2 Interpretation
leading roles in order to save the work from ruin. Upon her death the play
turns from a disaster to a wild success, but at the end of the play the murderer
is himself killed by the mafia boss who funds the play, and whose mistress was
the disastrous hopeful actress at the heart of its potential ruin. Nichols contends
that ultimately Allen renders Cheech, the artist of the revived play, a
failure, because he lacks the judgment to understand the limits of the value of
art in relation to actual life. Particularly, Nichols illuminates how Allen renders
Cheech indifferent to his own death, on account of his hope for new revisions
to his play, which are never actually produced. As Nichols views it, the film is
the story of the artist beginning to address the question, “Can the integrity of
art be purchased with the integrity of human beings?” (191)—and Cheech fails
to recognize that the answer is a resounding no.
Nichols’ account of Allen’s moral teaching is impressive: she
illustrates that Allen has a far more coherent moral vision than one might
expect, and that he presents this moral vision with a subtlety that is lost to
many. Without her commentary I would have been more inclined to regard
Bullets simply as Allen’s comical testament to the view that great art rightfully
overrides the concerns of many human lives. With her commentary, I began to
see that parsing out Allen’s moral understanding is a far more complex affair
than my initial impression would admit. Yet returning to my initial impression,
and considering that in the film Allen creates (if equivocally) something of a
comic hero out of a murderous playwright, one might wonder whether Allen
does in fact lend his work to something of the view that art can override morality,
or that the standards for art are in some sense beyond conventional
morality. While Nichols astutely undermines the view that Allen simply creates
a dark hero whose immorality is excused on account of the greatness of his art,
Bullets still seems to leave some room for a variation on this possibility.
In fact, in many of Allen’s films, and especially his more recent
ones (again, Deconstructing Harry comes to mind), Allen appears also to be
posing subtle challenges to accepted morality. In films such as Bullets and especially
Deconstructing Harry, Allen renders appealing what are typically
understood as immoral actions (in Bullets, sacrificing human life for good art;
in Deconstructing Harry ignoring a morally reprehensible author on account of
the greatness of his work), and thus challenges their status as such. At the very
least, Allen appears to be pointing to the need for artistic merit to enter into the
criteria for moral judgment. Perhaps even more, Allen seems to be playing, in a
Nietzschean fashion, with morality altogether. That is, Allen seems to be playing
precisely on the modern Nietzschean discomfort with morality as such. In