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

Book Review: Reconstructing Woody
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this vein, it seems that Nichols’ efforts to draw out the morally grounded Allen
are important; for through them we can appreciate that Allen is no nihilist. At
the same time, however, it may be that in focusing on Allen as a moral comic,
Nichols is not persuasive to the audience of people suspicious of morality itself,
an audience that Allen also seems to be addressing directly. Nichols clarifies
some of the more salutary aspects of Allen’s work, but one might be inclined to
probe further into the moral discomfort, or the discomfort with morals, that
seems to be the effect of so many of Allen’s films.
I can perhaps best illustrate my point by exploring Nichols’
remarks on Play It Again Sam. This film, as Nichols reminds us, is at once a
replay and a revision of Casablanca. As I understand it, the movie addresses
whether the comic hero, Allan Felix, who is, to use Nichols’ apt description, an
“insecure, clumsy, whining, hypochondriac” (19), can in any manner imitate
Casablanca’s hero Rick (Humphrey Bogart), in a contemporary context with a
contemporary woman. Allen’s comical response to this problem is that he can:
he suggests that Casablanca can still be imitated in the sense that it can elevate
the moral actions of even the wimpiest of contemporary men, and that, despite
the subsequent passing of circumstances that make Casablanca’s Rick a courageous
hero, the moral elevation of a weak man is a kind of heroism. The end of
the movie is a direct parody of the closing of Casablanca. After having had an
affair with his best friend Dick’s wife, Linda, and after coming to the conclusion
that he ought, out of loyalty to his friend, attempt to restore the latter’s marriage,
Allan Felix waits in eagerness at the airport to repeat Rick’s famous
urgings to Ilsa that appear at the close of Casablanca. Felix waits to tell Linda,
that if she does not return to her husband she’ll “regret it, maybe not today,
maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of [her] life.” Whereas Ilsa had
famously opted to allow Rick to do the thinking for them in making this decision,
in Allen’s rewrite, Dick’s wife, and Felix’s brief lover, Linda, pronounces
that she herself has come to the conclusion that she ought to return
to her husband without any help from Felix. Felix’s repetition of Bogart’s lines
is comical, but they are saved from being ridiculous because they reflect a
triumph of Felix’s loyalty that is moderated by the circumstantial limits to
his heroism.
Nichols takes Felix’s actions as a reflection of Allen’s teaching
that the heroism of Casablanca has a place in contemporary lives, and praises
Allen for delivering this teaching (29). In pointing to the extreme limitations
on the possibility of heroism in present times, however, one wonders whether
Allen is invoking something of a lament on the present state of affairs in which