A Companion to Woody Allen by Peter J. Bailey & Sam B. Girgus

Author:Peter J. Bailey & Sam B. Girgus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

Viewers know that Cristina is not necessarily pure, virtuous, simple, or chaste, but as a white symbol, she is quite powerful. Throughout the initial scenes that include both Maria Elena and Cristina, Maria Elena is even dressed in white, a symbolic erasure of her Latinity. When director Allen moves into a city, he brings white privilege with him; he lampoons and minimizes that which isn’t white, and in the case of casting Vicky Cristina Barcelona, he persuades Spanish actors Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, two powerful and admirable talents acclaimed across the globe, to succumb to his script and his vision of their own homeland, and their language.

The questions raised by the notable absence of people of color in Allen’s films run straight to the core of what responsibilities a director has to the material he or she presents on screen. Scholar Henry Louis Gates writes, “Common sense says that you don’t bracket out 90% of the world’s cultural heritage if you really want to learn about the world” (qtd. in Greene 1993: 13). Similarly, Hermes and Adolfsson claim that filmmakers undertake a significant “burden of representation,” whenever they depict an unrepresented group (2007: 256), or, I would argue, a location that has a complex multicultural history. Allen may not agree to this burden of representation, but nonetheless, the privileged white aesthetic upon which he insists for his films does serve to represent the world in a way that minimizes the presence of racial others. Although he may not want to be held accountable for such a burden, the images and representations he frames with his camera “serve particular social interests” (Dyer 1997: 82), such as an investment in maintaining white power and white privilege. His art participates and contributes to the continuance of white privilege, regardless of whether he is conscious of this fact or indifferent to it. The work itself represents a particular way of thinking about whiteness.

The Allen template for centering whiteness on a city landscape has been problematic throughout his career. In the films that have used Manhattan as backdrop, critics have long pointed out that Allen’s New York was decidedly and excessively white, upper class, and insular. And Allen has never seen this critique as part of his “burden of responsibility” as an artist. As recently as 2009, he defended his portrayal of New York:

My memories of New York are unrealistic. The New York that I grew up loving was, ironically enough, the New York of Hollywood parties, where people lived in penthouses with white telephones and came home at five in the morning . . . people popping champagne corks and making witty banter and elevators that open into your apartment directly. I never knew New York as it really existed. For that, you have to speak to Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese (Nguyen 2010).

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