Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
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Book Review: Reconstructing Woody<br />
9 3<br />
this vein, it seems that Nichols’ efforts to draw out the morally grounded Allen<br />
are important; for through them we can appreciate that Allen is no nihilist. At<br />
the same time, however, it may be that in focusing on Allen as a moral comic,<br />
Nichols is not persuasive to the audience of people suspicious of morality itself,<br />
an audience that Allen also seems to be addressing directly. Nichols clarifies<br />
some of the more salutary aspects of Allen’s work, but one might be inclined to<br />
probe further into the moral discomfort, or the discomfort with morals, that<br />
seems to be the effect of so many of Allen’s films.<br />
I can perhaps best illustrate my point by exploring Nichols’<br />
remarks on Play It Again Sam. This film, as Nichols reminds us, is at once a<br />
replay <strong>and</strong> a revision of Casablanca. As I underst<strong>and</strong> it, the movie addresses<br />
whether the comic hero, Allan Felix, who is, to use Nichols’ apt description, an<br />
“insecure, clumsy, whining, hypochondriac” (19), can in any manner imitate<br />
Casablanca’s hero Rick (Humphrey Bogart), in a contemporary context with a<br />
contemporary woman. Allen’s comical response to this problem is that he can:<br />
he suggests that Casablanca can still be imitated in the sense that it can elevate<br />
the moral actions of even the wimpiest of contemporary men, <strong>and</strong> that, despite<br />
the subsequent passing of circumstances that make Casablanca’s Rick a courageous<br />
hero, the moral elevation of a weak man is a kind of heroism. The end of<br />
the movie is a direct parody of the closing of Casablanca. After having had an<br />
affair with his best friend Dick’s wife, Linda, <strong>and</strong> after coming to the conclusion<br />
that he ought, out of loyalty to his friend, attempt to restore the latter’s marriage,<br />
Allan Felix waits in eagerness at the airport to repeat Rick’s famous<br />
urgings to Ilsa that appear at the close of Casablanca. Felix waits to tell Linda,<br />
that if she does not return to her husb<strong>and</strong> she’ll “regret it, maybe not today,<br />
maybe not tomorrow, but soon, <strong>and</strong> for the rest of [her] life.” Whereas Ilsa had<br />
famously opted to allow Rick to do the thinking for them in making this decision,<br />
in Allen’s rewrite, Dick’s wife, <strong>and</strong> Felix’s brief lover, Linda, pronounces<br />
that she herself has come to the conclusion that she ought to return<br />
to her husb<strong>and</strong> without any help from Felix. Felix’s repetition of Bogart’s lines<br />
is comical, but they are saved from being ridiculous because they reflect a<br />
triumph of Felix’s loyalty that is moderated by the circumstantial limits to<br />
his heroism.<br />
Nichols takes Felix’s actions as a reflection of Allen’s teaching<br />
that the heroism of Casablanca has a place in contemporary lives, <strong>and</strong> praises<br />
Allen for delivering this teaching (29). In pointing to the extreme limitations<br />
on the possibility of heroism in present times, however, one wonders whether<br />
Allen is invoking something of a lament on the present state of affairs in which