Philosophical Tennis With Woody Allen

It’s hard to forget some writers because of how I was introduced to them. I was initiated into the world of Woody Allen by a girl I met in undergrad. We started going out a few weeks before graduation even though she had a boyfriend back home. She loaned me her copies of Woody Allen’s three books of essays and stories and it was love at first read for me. (Funnily enough, someone took a picture of me that year where my hair is flying out and I am bug-eyed behind my glasses, looking a little bit like Woody.) Then, of course, she left me when her boyfriend came to watch her graduate. But we had been keeping very late hours and so the night the boyfriend arrived to consummate their four months apart, she fell asleep. Then she told him about me and sent him packing, finally showing up at my door. Just like in the movies.

Except that when I went a year later to visit her in Connecticut, things had changed. As luck would have it, there was a Woody Allen festival playing that week and we took in a couple of his films. But let’s just sum things up by saying that those films were all I got to see. And pretty soon she sent me packing. Just like in a movie. A Woody Allen movie.

Even decades later, watching Match Point (recently out on DVD), I can see that Woody keeps on getting the vicissitudes of love just right. The story centres on a former tennis star who meets a girl and moves up in the world with the help of her family even as he is falling for the girl his future brother-in-law is engaged to. Sounds like another Woody Allen comedy - just like my life - right? Except it’s not a comedy. No, no – not at all.

It reflects an ongoing concern in his work with the nature of the universe: that is, that it has no meaning. This comes up in films as diverse as Sleeper, Annie Hall, Hannah and her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors and, well, just about all his films. And even in a one act play called “God” in the book Without Feathers. His characters, especially the ones played by him, keep bringing up the meaninglessness in life. In Crimes and Misdemeanors a rabbi renowned for his positive attitude ends up killing himself. As Mark T. Conrad points out in his essay, “God, Suicide and the Meaning of Life” (in the book Woody Allen and Philosophy), Allen is consistently atheistic and fatalistic in his point of view, believing that since there is no God there can never be any meaning to life.

Because of Allen’s obsession with meaninglessness, there may be no better writer to illustrate the fine line between drama and comedy (other than Shakespeare). After all, luck and fate play major roles in both tragedies and comedies. If things had gone just a little differently in Romeo and Juliet, for example, that whacky couple just might have made it and Shakespeare might have thought about calling his play My Big Fat Italian Wedding. Then think about the description for Match Point – man falls for future brother-in-law’s fiancé; he marries the sister, then brother-in-law breaks off engagement, etc. That could easily be a comedy as both couples trade back and forth with hilarious results. In fact, Woody’s done that type of story as a comedy before.

But Match Point is never close to being a comedy in tone. While we laugh at the nature of the absurd in his comedies, we are in this movie horrified by the direction that fate seems to drive our main character. A tennis player he once competed against asks him if he ever wonders how his life might have gone if one or more tennis balls that hit the net had gone over rather than falling back on his side. The movie proposes that it doesn’t matter – that looking for meaning, or patterns, or justice in the world is pointless. The ideas that make us laugh when they are in Allen’s comedies shake us to the core in a film like this.

Now, while I’m a big believer in fate (I think we do things because we can’t help but be who we are), I think we can learn to see the patterns that we create in our own lives. For example, it might be a bad idea to go on a long trip to visit a long distance girlfriend who broke up with the last guy she had a long distance relationship with and who made a long trip to see her. That’s not fate – that’s just common sense. And it is a pattern – not a pleasant pattern to be on the receiving end of, but a pattern nonetheless. Unlike the modern optimists, I don’t waste time trying to change other people’s patterns. I hardly waste much time trying to change my own. But I recognize them. I learn from them in some small ways. I don’t rely on the existence of God to give me meaning. I rely often on the same thing Woody himself does - writing patterns into existence, even if his patterns are about the lack of meaning in life.