Dr. Strangelove, or,
How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Enrage The Feminists

Warning: Long entry, destined to get me in no limit of hot water. Ah, c'est la vie....

      Oy, I had started to type an entry after watching Woody Allen's latest film, Anything Else, but my machine (as always, "my flurking computer") crashed on me several times, and lost the entry, before I wound up getting into an extended discussion with the Zaniac on matters entirely too intellectually convoluted to explain here. (Or, rather, for me to explain in my current rye-sible state. Ah, rye, precious rye, kinder to me than even less-spirited imbibements.) But I was going to report on the Allen film, and my guffawed reaction to it-- not to Allen's humour or his one-liners, but to his one character, Amanda, played by the ever-so-entrancing Christina Ricci. Why? No, I wasn't going to go on about Ricci's magnetism, or her time spent in underwear during the film. No, it was her character, a character I'm glad to report Ricci played wonderfully. More significantly, it's a character that critics, male and female alike, tended to describe as yet another one of Allen's nightmare women, yet another proof of Allen's supposed misogyny. Feminists, especially, hated the character.

      I can't say I loved or hated the character. I have to say, though, that I both loved and hated the character, and finally loved it, because my hatred is perfectly in keeping with the responses the character is meant to generate. There's another dimension to this, a dimension feminists will loathe, nay, disdain, eschew, eviscerate, and entirely deny. But they'd be wrong.

      What I loved and hated about the character are the same qualities I've loved and hated about almost all of the women that have sauntered in and out of my life (and, I admit, this may just be the result of miserable luck on my part). It's plain to see why the Jason Biggs character is attracted to her, beyond the physical: she has those magnificent eyes, the ability to charm and to speak intelligently about subjects of common interest and fascination, and she possesses too a kind of irresistible capacity to engage at every level. That is, of course, before the other shoe drops.

      Ah, yes, the other shoe always drops, with a thud slightly heavier than a meteoric landing.

      I won't go into this in too much detail, because I'm very much aware that many will read what I say according to their own self-defensive templates, whether personal, theoretical, ideological or political. I also want it clear that I don't think all women like Allen's Amanda. But it does bear stating: at least in my experience, more women (in their twenties, in this day and age) are more like Amanda than they'd ever care to admit, and more than they'd dare to see. Yes, Allen's Amanda is way, way, way, way, way too familiar. Stunningly familiar. Eerily familiar. I can still feel the reverberations to reality. And while I'm smirking as I write this, and I chuckled as I watched it, there was a horrifying humour to Allen's precision in cutting to the bone. Worse still, I suspect most of the men I know would silently nod in acknowledgment of Allen's figuration of this character, and think-- but not likely say-- "Oh, yeah, I know her." Worse, they'd tacitly say, "I loved a girl like her." Then they'd shake their heads in recognition of their embarrassment. (I fully expect no man in his right, pragmatic mind will comment on this post at all: I also fully expect to be flamed by my female readers.)

      I think this points, though, to a more significant issue, beyond any single person's experiences. It has to do, I think, with the tendency of some, like Allen's Amanda, to be personally and morally and insert-adverb-here obtuse, whether that obtuseness is intentional or not. Sometimes it's clear: there are aspects of manipulation, deception, narcissism, thoughtlessness, capriciousness, and vacuity; at other times, it's apparent she just doesn't see anything beyond own ken, and she's a character utterly blinkered in self-involvement. I'm not using this character as a basis to attack women. Rather, it's a reason to attack those self-imagists within the feminist movement who'd like to think idealistically about feminine representation. Sorry, I speak here only from experience, but a lot more "real" women have more in common with Amanda than than they have in discrepancy with her, and more than they have in common with their purported role-models or idealized self-comparisons with paradigms or credos. No wonder the idealists hate such characters: they desperately want to believe such characters do not have corollaries in reality. Sorry, very, very sorry, but such corollaries do exist, and they exist plentifully. The trick is learning to deal with such counter-examples to your argument.

      I don't want to make general statements about women, feminism, or any such thing, and nor do I want to take Amanda as an example in any sense, whether in terms of Allen's treatment of women or concepts of woman. All this strikes me as just a walk down a blind alley toward a gang with switchblades at the ready. But the familiarity of matters suggests an eerie proximation to a known, or knowable, reality, or a reality to some more common in the observance than in the breach, as much as we'd like to believe the breach the fact instead of that which we see in our ever-so-tainted experiences.

      It's cavalier these days to invoke Oscar Wilde in proof of an argument, but he fits here more than in most scenarios, and I offer this as cautionary and expository rather than accusatory: in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde notes that "the nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass." There's much truth in this, and I'm inclined, in this twisted way, of saying that Allen's Amanda offers a surprising realism of characterization. I hate to say it that way, I truly do. But, whoa, there are damned good reasons why I have shivers down my spine after watching such an otherwise lightweight film.

      See it for yourself. (And men, by the way, be willing, too, to see yourself in the Jason Biggs character; how many of us, for reasons one or another, have gone against better judgment in some desperate desire either to believe in another, or to avoid confronting fact, or, perhaps worse, loneliness.) What I finally love, though, about Allen's Amanda (as a character) is that she's not just physically attractive or whatever; even after all is said and done, there's a dimension of character and behaviour that-- however destructive, manipulative, or whatever-- remains engaging and enticing, even loveable. Translation: as monstrous as her behaviour can be, she never entirely becomes a monster per se. Guys, you know what I'm talkin' about. There's still something inexplicably there. And, damn it all, that's why so many of us keep making the same mistakes, and why so many keep acting in the same ways that we do, male or female, Biggs or Ricci.

      But, there it is, the strength of the film: more than any limp-minded Seinfeld episode, Allen at his best does observational comedy with an air of significance and self-awareness. But as much as Woody's more daunting critics, of all stripes, would like to dismiss him, and (frankly) as much as the film does falter in other aspects, he stands sometimes like a clothed Emperor, while the audience, thinking their leader parading himself about naked, stands mocking, but curiously air-conditioned.

      Oh, no wonder I felt a chill. Harrumph, harrumph, harrumph.

      Okay, now, ye may cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.