Posted By BillHeise on April 1, 2009

In 1983, as I was preparing to read Joseph Campbell  in my doomed attempt to find answers to the “big questions” posed by the Modern movement, the world was watching Woody Allen’s latest film, Zelig. This marked the the highwater mark of the modernist movement, as well as a glimpse of the new postmodernism which would replace it.

Zelig is the completely fictional, highly entertaining documentary of the chameleon-man, Leonard Zelig. Played by Allen, Zelig is a man first noticed at a party by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who has the ability to turn in to other people when surrounded by them. For example, if he is among doctors, he transforms into a doctor, if around overweight people, he quickly becomes heavy himself. I shouldn’t say it’s an ability, it’s more of a coping mechanism for Zelig. As he admits in psychiatric care, he wants to fit in so badly that he literally becomes whoever he is with. (Cited here)

The analyst in me wants to reduce it to its basic components. Compare Zelig to the movie Hair, where Claude Bukowski is transformed from his mere Oklahoma existence to the higher plane of existence in “Hare Krishna.” See the point of transformation, when he imagines Sheila/Donna being brought out on a platter by an upper middle class twit, but she manages to transform herself into “the goddess,” thereby subsuming the Western tradition’s pursuit of middle class twitdom to the ‘higher power” of goddessdom, and more importantly, the male Western concept of God for an older and more comprehensive “White Goddess.”

The release from individualism towards a more corporate body had been foreseen by Modernism itself. It is, for instance, the focus of Charlie Chaplin’s response to Hitler.

Chaplin’s Response to Facism

Charlie Chaplin appeals to exactly that sort of “higher plane” that Claude Bukowski in Hair divides himself off from the world of individual sensibility in Hair. When Chaplin speaks of the power of democracy, he does not speak of the power of individuals: “In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written “the kingdom of God is within man ” – not one man, nor a group of men – but in all men – in you, the people.” This, I repeat, is corporate group consciousness, not individuality.

What could be wrong with fighting Hitler? Nothing. But I’m a little concerned about the way that Chaplin divides democracy from Hitler’s fascism.

In dividing Hitler’s realm from democracy, Charlie Chaplin had given the impression that we would have heaven on earth, if only greed could be taken away. “The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed,” he says. ““Greed has poisoned men’s souls – has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.”

In place of greed, Chaplin offers us a “brave new world.”

We are coming into a new world. A kind new world where men will rise above their hate and brutality.

Now, the freedom loving hippies of the sixties thought they could turn back on themselves, without greed and its corruption. They pictured themselves as the first generation to wake up from the nightmare of history. And that in and of itself was enough. All that remains to be done was to clear away the vestiges of old ideas.

Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

He does this by elevating discourse from the worldly and material to what Derrida would call the logocentric plane, just as Claude Bukowski managed to escape the rigors of his individual circumstance by grasping on to something larger than himself.

Zelig

Woody Allen had been on a serious modern quest to discover the roots of himself through psychoanalysis. By all accounts he has yet to grasp the sources of the self. This is a common problem in American culture, and not one confined to New York intellectuals. Walk into any bookstore and compare the size of the philosophy section to the size of the self-help section.

Americans have decided that individual rights are guarantors of ourselves as human beings, and yet we cannot identify ourselves. Like Allen, we are still looking.

In 1983, Woody Allen had stepped out of the lesser individual existence to the higher function promised by stepping away from his individual self. Then he spent the rest of his life looking for what he gave away. He reads Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Joyce, and all sorts of other serious authors looking for the answers to the questions posed by his encounter with Modernism. He quotes them in his serious intellectual films. But he never arrives at an answer to the problems of the self.

In Zelig, he finds himself without himself, able to change his personality on demand to the whims of those around him. He becomes, by following the Modernist dictates, the quintessential Postmodern man. This bespeaks an idealism common to both modernism and postmodernism. Both want to travel away from themselves to a higher plane. The problem for the Moderns is that they can’t get to the end promised by Modernism. The Postmoderns simply give up in despair and they travel their rootless journey from place to place.

Allen had grasped after higher power Modernism held out as the end of inquiry, and he failed. In 1983, I too was looking for answers in idealism, and I thought I had found it in the words of Joseph Campbell. But I was not satisfied, as Allen was, with becoming postmodern.

Categories: Movies, Philosophy
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