Who knew that between his early run of physical comedies — What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), Sleeper (1973) — and his long run of New York dramatic comedies — beginning with Annie Hall (1977) and tapering-off some time in the mid-90s, with Deconstructing Harry (1997) perhaps — Woody Allen made a film like Interiors (1978), an unbearingly dark psychodrama (–there’s even a rape scene) without a joke or gag to be heard throughout?
In style and story, Interiors departs significantly from what we might think of as the Woody Allen signature. The sets are sparse, bleak — it’s about the demise of a minimalist interior decorator — and filled with close-ups, silences, and reaction shots. (Of the Woody Allen films I’ve seen, only Another Woman (1988) compares, in terms of style and sensibility.) But beyond his own diffuse oeuvre, Interiors is decidedly ‘literary’ in tone and ambition, moving nimbly between classical, theatrical, and film-historical registers. It begins and ends with the haunting, empty architecture of To the Lighthouse, only without the first happy half of the novel; at times seems like a play, with natural sounds left-in unsweetened; and there’s an unmistakable arthouse, ‘European cinema’ bent to the film. The mood and style are indeed often likened to Bergman’s (though Antonioni seems just as appropriate), but in the end it’s the decidedly American hand of Gordon Willis, the cinematographer, that prevails. Though best known for his work in The Godfather trilogy, this just might be the film in which his talents are the most pronounced and the most in command of the work.
Interiors, however, can also be seen as a parable of sorts for the history of the West and its succession of aesthetic regimes. The Greek, the Roman, and, to a lesser extent, the American enter into a sort of blind, addled dance, as if art and its different ages were a soap opera or a bitter affair trapped in an eternal present. For instance, Eve (Geraldine Page), the mother and narrative center to the film, is everywhere associated with a Roman austerity, but one whose cold, ‘metrical’ moderation is ceaselessly mistaken — by an equally heartless Dionysian brio — for an unfeeling regimentation.
In the above scene, to be sure, which occurs just a few minutes into the film, Eve, recently left by her husband Arthur (E.G. Marshall), is shown adjusting with obsessive-compulsive control the arrangement of her daughter Joey’s (Mary Beth Hurt) bedroom. On a creaky bench against a blank white wall, presumably also the mother’s design, Eve and Joey descend into a bitter exchange over her trial separation, the imminent reconciliation of which Joey obstinately, and it would seem compassionately, refuses to entertain — for her mother’s sake. Without much in the way of resolution, the scene cuts to Eve on her way home, stone-faced in a cab with New York whizzing past in the rear window. A moment later we see her enter a darkened apartment, the flick of the switch illuminating a minimalist, classical mise en scène. Vases, pedestals, a marble table, and her tight Roman bun fastened high on her head here come together to form an image of impeccable austerity, and beauty — and then it cuts to her daughter Renata (Diane Keaton) talking to her psychoanalyst.
The husband Arthur, by contrast, approximates the Greek — vibrant, lively, the Dionysus to her Apollo. But with a catch. Is he, in actuality, himself imbued with vitality, or is a proxy required? His declaration of separation — which is indeed a declaration, spoken in near legalese — is dry and methodical, as if by refraining from the slightest periphrasis he’ll be spared judgment and culpability. He is, to be sure, an absent father, a smaller man and mind than the wife that dwarfs him. She, after all, is the one in possession of the artistic soul that still, despite their feelings of resentment, continues to inspire her children’s careers — Renata is a New Yorker-published poet, Flyn (Kristin Griffith) is a TV actress, and Joey is struggling to find a creative outlet, — not to mention the fact, mentioned in passing, that she funded her husband’s law degree and fledgling career so many years ago.
So, even if Arthur is persistently associated with ‘the Greek’ — after declaring the trial separation, he immediately takes off for the Greek isles — the Dionysian quality to his character seems in fact illusory, or artfully misplaced. The same, no doubt, could be said for Eve, vis-a-vis the Apollonian. Though she’s nominally, visually, symbolically austere and unfeeling, isn’t she also, in actuality, embattled from within by a tremendous reserve of bottled emotion? Her face itself registers, through nearly every scene in which she plays a part, a complex, internal battle of restraint, the only true unleashing of which takes place, heretically (–she’s a devout believer) and explosively, in a church, where she smashes, in perhaps the most passionate scene of the film, the candle vigil on the altar.
Between these two ancient sensibilities, which themselves mix problematically, emotively, intervenes a third, the American, a hybrid, or retarded, form thereof. Cheap but fun, interested but unintellectual — low art but art nonetheless, — the American affectation serves as the proxy, or alibi, for a false Dionysian affair. When Arthur flees to the Greek isles — in search of the exotic, one would think — he brings back a Floridian from Vegas. It’s as if the perfect tragedy — imagined, by Nietzsche, as a marriage of Apollo and Dionysus — could be tragic no longer without a crude, tasteless American-style divorce.
Through Pearl (Maureen Stapleton), who’s introduction in the scene below takes everyone by surprise, the classical elegance of an aestheticized, symbolic conflict descends into the crude, vulgar affair that it is. One has not switched between two competing registers, two variations of profundity; rather, the scale itself is abandoned as so much pretension and posture. Art itself falls away, and a certain unknowing, indifferent artifice — the kind that knows nothing of what it has destroyed — takes its place. Later, unable even to perceive the delicate taste of the home’s interior design, Pearl remarks, to the daughters’ collective horror, that when she moves in all her belongings, the house will look like a warehouse. And when she mentions that her son runs an art gallery, she’s not putting on airs in an effort to fit in and play the part. She really does consider her son’s Vegas hotel lobby concession stand — where clowns framed on black velvet are sold — to be a place of art. It’s as if, through this awful glimpse, we are let to see how some of our European neighbors must view us.
Now, at first glance it would seem that this scene merely reimagines, once again, the tired collapse into barbarism of the Western classical tradition, but upon closer inspection, the advent of a third, disruptive figure — the “American” — can be seen to undermine this timeworn myth. Pearl is, to be sure, a surprise and a disruption: she comes from outside the film, so to speak, about halfway through, and represents a complete, unforeseen departure from the family’s social and intellectual milieu. Her tastes, or lack thereof, shock and offend the children, she has no artistic sensibility, lacks the proper paralyzing self-consciousness, and is by all standards unintellectual. But is she the barbarian to their antiquity?
Not quite, but almost. The world she invades is, it would seem, less overrun than ripened for dissolution. A pervasive decadence has already set in amongst the group; they have turned on their mother, who inspired them, while sparing the father all judgment; they’re concerned more with reviews and perceptions than with the works and ideas themselves; their very marriages are being torn apart by envy, which seems to have long since overtaken the careers themselves. On the whole, it’s a damning portrait of intellectualism, but for that reason invites the barbarian’s patent clarity of thought, even if that clarity is ultimately a form of thoughtlessness.
This isn’t to say that Pearl is ‘right’, or on to something, when she finds the meaning of the squealer [see clip below] transparent or self-evident — one can, to be sure, sense the seed of a uniquely American anti-intellectualism in her response, — but even so, this kind of American ‘intuitionism’ cannot, by definition, be the non-position it pretends to be. If anything, her feeling that there’s simply nothing to say — ‘you just know’, she says — stakes out the opposite, and just as problematic, extreme to the family’s over-intellectualization of the subject. Speaking in cliches (–Woody Allen’s specialty), the shameless name-dropping, their talking from every position but their own experience … one gets the sense, watching the dinner scene, that they’re all simply pathologically unable to discuss the play they just saw, much less their family situation.
That America destroyed art and tradition is what the cuckolded European tells herself when, in fact, its conventions, its seriousness, its rigors have been seduced, which is something else entirely. ‘A pedestrian crudity that destroys tradition instead of supplanting it’ is a boring, tired tale — but to imagine the fall as a bitter love triangle between Greek, Roman, and American affectations restores the passions, and bitterness, proper to what would otherwise seem an abstract changing of the guards that took place so long ago.
