Blue Jasmine: Woody Allen and the Pointless Universe

by Christopher Barr

“Anxiety, nightmares, and a nervous breakdown.  There’s only so many traumas a person can withstand before they take to the streets and start screaming.”  - Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), in Blue Jasmine

Blue Jasmine is a film about a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  A film told in present day as well as the not so distant past, within the last couple of years.  Thank you Mr. Allen for not reminding us with dates and times at the bottom of the screen when you flipped from one time to the next.  Like Midnight in Paris, Allen figured his audience would get the drift.

That is one of my favorite aspects of Woody Allen movies; they don’t treat their audience like children.  These films are for adults, not to dissuade young people from watching by no means, but they are mature and uniquely cultivated.

I think that Woody Allen knows, like Sigmund Freud did during the last years before his death, that people are generally impervious to psychoanalysis.  Neurosis and trauma exist in the subconscious and on a conscious level, we don’t have access.  These psychological maledictions are in the driver seat guiding us all through life without any regard to our consent.

People can read all the self-help books and watch all the talk shows they want.  If you don’t educate yourself on getting over what it is to be you, you are doomed to living a life of always wondering why bad things keep happening to you.

"Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience. But nothing is a greater cause of suffering." – Dostoevsky

Woody Allen generally creates characters without hope.  They philosophize over art and music, lament about the existence of God and the meaning of life, while in New York cafes to their friends, but they rarely ever reflect on themselves.  Like Jasmine, they blame everyone else except themselves for their current station in life.  In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer, like Groucho Marx, wouldn’t want to be in a club that would have him as a member.  His character is an intelligent and cultivated guy, like most of his leading characters but they don’t learn.  I think Woody Allen, along with Freud, thinks we are at least better off knowing how fucked up we are.  And intelligence through life experience and education doesn’t end there, life is learning till death.  The point is to try and live with that.  Which I think is where a lot of his characters end up at least, is knowing to live with the fact that they’re going to die and alone the way they aren’t going to get everything they want.  But then again, a lot of his characters struggle with never letting go of their egotistical views of the world.

So why do so many people dislike Woody Allen’s work?

Allen: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?
Woman: Yes, it is.
Allen: What does it say to you?
Woman: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless, bleak straitjacket in a black, absurd cosmos.
Allen: What are you doing Saturday night?
Woman: Committing suicide.
Allen: What about Friday night?

Prior to investigation, like his often referenced Freud, Woody Allen is disliked. And also like Freud when asked why, people fall back on Freud’s cocaine use and Woody's infidelity with Mia Farrow's step daughter. When asked about the meat of their respective professions, one often is left with vacuous glares and 'just-becauses'.  Woody Allen movies aren’t for everyone and he’s the first person that would agree with that.  His Schopenhauer use of humor and dread is often too confusing to the average Michael Bay movie lover.  They want their happy ending and Woody says, like in life, fuck that.

I can’t remember the first Woody Allen film I ever saw.  It was likely Annie Hall or possibly Hannah and her Sisters.  But I can say that I fell in love with his films.  They, to me have also been a relief from contrived, predictable movies.  I could also relate to the frustrating fact that generally people are ignorant and wish to stay dumb down and uninteresting.  So Woody Allen’s films allowed me to see a lot of what I was thinking, played out.  It was also nice to hear his characters give cultural references that I understood, as well as one’s I wasn’t familiar with, but later had the intuition to learn about.

 “To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.”

Religion has always played a huge part in Woody’s films, and it wouldn’t take a psychoanalyst to discover why that is.  Transgression, fault, accusation, blame, plea, shame, contrition, remorse, repentance, apology, punishment, revenge, forgiveness, reparation and reconciliation.  Guilt is a concept that forms part of a matrix to do with moral division and reunion.  Comedian Lenny Bruce put it this way, ”There should be a statute of limitations….why do you keep breaking our balls for that crime?  Why, Jew, because you skirt the issue.  You blame it on the Roman soldiers.  Alright.  I’ll clear the air once and for all.  Yes, we did it.  I did it, my family.  I found a note in my basement.  It said: ‘We killed him. Signed Morty.’”

“ Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.” - Freud

Crimes and Misdemeanors, a masterpiece of cinema, dealt with a profound amount of guilt, but its main character was ultimately selfish in nature.  Man has affair and affair backlashes, now man must illuminate the problem so wife and career won’t be affected.  Man goes through much religious turmoil then hires a hit man to kill his girlfriend on the side.  This to me is when religion, to the believer, no longer becomes convenient in their life and begins to work against the natural behavior of desire, where it becomes inconvenient in a person’s pursuit of happiness in all its disloyalty and deceit.

“I don't believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.”

One of Woody Allen’s most beloved films, one I might add he hated; Manhattan was about transference, just not on the surface.  On the surface it is about the fact that the universe is meaningless and life is pointless but that is no reason to kill yourself.  But I think it is about a man who realizes that the young woman he is unethically seeing, hence the transference, needs to stop.  What I love about this film is it’s either telling us that Isaac doesn’t care about all that and he’s being selfish or love isn’t so easily defined.  I’m going to go with the fact that Isaac is much older than Tracy and he loves the attention.

Jasmine also loved the attention of her husband and chose to look the other way, when the reality of their relationship interfered with the luxurious life she was living under.  Reality did finally slap her in the face but it came at much cost.  Blue Jasmine ended with uncertainty, like in life, we don’t really know what’s going to happen to us.  Woody just wants us all to hop off the pedestal of our ego driven narcissism and live in the world, in all its dreadfulness, but I think more importantly while we do that, enjoy learning, listening to music, analyzing art, talking to people and try, just for a moment, like at the end of Midnight in Paris, to enjoy being with the lady on the bridge in the rain, with Cole Porter playing in your head.