Mary P. Nichols - Reconstructing Woody: Art, Love, and Life in the Films of Woody Allen

H ad it not been for my graduate students, this book would not have been written. It started in 1992 when my husband and I happened to rent Woody Allens Midsummer Nights Sex Comedy for our evening entertainment. I was teaching Greek political thought at the time, including Aristophanes Clouds. Similarities between the ancient comedian and the modern filmmaker jumped out. Each, for example, mocked a pompous professor of philosophy. While Socrates taught his students in the Clouds to reduce the Greek gods to natural phenomena, in Sex Comedy Leopold Sturgis pronounces in his university classes that nothing exists that cannot be touched, tasted, felt, or in some scientific fashion proven. In both cases the philosophers are at the top of the world, boasters who do not foresee their comeuppance, and the comic poet lets their pretensions collapse in smoke. Was Sex Comedy saying today what the Clouds said over two thousand years ago? Was Woody Allen a modem-day Aristophanes? And why was philosophy a particularly good butt for the comics laughter? My students would have to see this movie.

The next week I watched Sex Comedy again, with my students. Showtime at five, followed by pizza, and then discussion late into the night. It was the first of many Woody Allen parties. The next semester I taught eighteenth-century political thought. We read Rousseau, Burke, and Kant and talked of the effect of romanticism, especially the new cult of the artist, on human life. Again, I invited students to my home for a movie. This time we watched Interiors. Over the years students have come and gone, but the parties have continued. At times, they were connected to my graduate courses; often it just felt like the right time in the semester to have a Woody Allen party. And newcomers to the program were as enthusiastic as the earlier students, or at least as tolerant of their teachers enthusiasms. For their support, their willingness to discuss, and their tolerance, I am deeply grateful.

I am also grateful to friends who have read part of and in some cases the entire manuscript and who have offered me their extensive criticismsSusan Benfield, Carly Kinsella, Dan Mahoney, Jeffrey Poelvoorde, Denise Schaeffer, and Catherine Zuckert. I am also grateful to my teacher Joseph Cropsey, who in addition to raising for me the enduring questions of poetry and philosophy, virtue and friendship, also cultivated my appreciation for stand-up comedy, and whose skepticism about this whole project no doubt spurred me to its completion. My husband David Nichols first introduced me to Woody Allen movies by taking me to see Play It Again, Sam before we were married and has enjoyed Allens movies with me over the years, even for the umpteenth time we watched them together. He has helped me host the Woody Allen parties, has often discussed Allens movies with me, and read my manuscript at its various stages. I am grateful for his encouragement and support in this as in everything. I would like to thank the Kobal Collection for permitting us to reproduce the stills from the movies, and Faber and Faber for their permission to reprint quotations from Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Bjorkman (also published as Woody Allen on Woody Allen: Woody Allen in His Own Words). Finally, I am grateful to Woody Allen for allowing me to quote from his movieswithin legal guidelines, of courseand, more important, for the hours of entertainment, thought, and discussion his movies have occasioned.