University of Cape Town – FAM2011S

Studying the Scenery

“We Have Great Sex”:
The subtleties of break-ups and milkshakes in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979)

If Allan Stewart Konigsberg is not as commonly respected a screenwriter as he perhaps should be, it’s really his own fault. Both because his workaholic oeuvre has tended to obscure his only occasional bouts of genius1, and that his more obvious five-decades-and-counting presence as a comedian/actor/director/popular nihilist/stutterer has always overshadowed his underlying creed as an indefatigable script scribbler. The litmus test of this thesis is to simply, for once, get him out of his own picture.
Thus we arrive in Manhattan2, just in time for its indispensable scene at 57 minutes, wherein Woody’s character, Isaac, – after prevaricating from the very
first exposition – finally comes ‘round to breaking off his risqué sojourn with
Mariel Hemingway’s Tracy, at the counter of a cozy ice-cream parlour on a particularly sunny and Gershwinian afternoon.

In one sense the action is inevitable enough so as to seem cliché:

She’s given him a spontaneous didactic gift (the harmonica); he uses it as an in- road to attest himself the “wrong person” for her “real affection”, thus quitting their “temporary fling”; she reasserts her true love and fidelity to him; he criticizes her young understanding of Love in general, repeating his self- annihilating rhetorical gesture of promising her “a dozen relationships far more passionate than this one” even before she reaches full maturity; she realizes he must be guarding a guilty conscience to insist so; questioned, he confesses to loving someone else (Diane Keaton’s character); “Gee, now I don’t feel so good”

1. For every Annie Hall, Hannah and her Sisters and Blue Jasmine, there’s seemingly always a September, To Rome With Love and Hollywood Ending waiting around the corner…
2. Chosen because it is probably Woody’s most self-consciously artful story (yet somehow the film of his he most reviles now) and a personal favourite of mine of which I have a pretty big poster stuck up on a wall to the right of the computer on which this is being written.

she says, then intuits that his consolations are just his way of spin-doctoring the break-up so as to deny his agency in her unhappiness; he tells her not to be so “precocious” and once again sells her his aged ineptitude as a boyfriend; she whimpers the point of her feelings of betrayal – not that he’d met someone else, but that he’d “met somebody that [he] liked better than [herself]”; he runs out of responses, openly confesses his feelings of guilt, and reverts back to his recommendation of age-appropriate lovers, to which she begins to cry and, though he holds his hypocritically doting hand on her shoulder, he cannot console her.

One would be hard-pressed to isolate a more definitively pivotal scene in the romantic-comedy canon. Buttressed by two bubbly montages of Isaac enjoying his new lover’s company and bookended on either side by two contrasting short static shots – first of Isaac meeting Tracy outside her school and then of him testing out the harmonica in his apartment without her – it signifies the ridiculously affecting central reversal of our impressions of either protagonist. Up until now we were slightly expecting the film to go (in more ways than one) the way of Annie Hall in telling the bittersweet tale of the Woody character’s progression into emotional and romantic maturity via the dispensing of earlier, inappropriate partners in lieu of embracing the Keaton character’s quirky worldliness and sex appeal. Or at least this is how the break-up scene usually goes: the protagonist confronts their lover by confessing the event that serves to separate them, the latter puts up a struggle, he attempts rational consolation, a temporary truce or a stormy divide is reached, and the protagonist emerges scathed but liberated. The subversive opposite occurs here.

Having already proffered more laughs in a black-and-white movie since the Marx brothers clattered into MGM, Manhattan veers into very open tragedy. We increasingly realize we are watching a dual confrontation: for every re- articulation of his argument for their split, Isaac is struck right back by Tracy’s insight into its inherent hypocrisy. Having been naturally aligned with his bourgeois guilt from the beginning it comes to us as a small but real revelation to hear – along with Isaac – the truth in her aggrieved retort “You keep stating [the need for our break-up] like it’s to my advantage when it’s you that wants to get out of it.” At this we realize that if Isaac was really so concerned with the dire ethics of a Nabokovian love affair he probably wouldn’t have started dating a high-schooler to begin with.3 Instead, by basically claiming that Tracy remains as immature and distant from his plane of romantic existence as she was before they met he exposes his own dumb disrespect for the self-conscious autonomy he himself has aided in teaching her. Thus the progression of the scene represents a 180-degree inversion of our preconditioned appraisal of the lovers: it’s Isaac who is revealed as the childish one and Tracy as the moral romantic.

It’s only now we should recall that Woody is essentially here – through both his writing and directing – undercutting ‘himself’, or at least the comic persona that will forever be mistaken for his actual personality. Undoubtedly knowing he will play the role of Isaac he nonetheless remains zealously even-handed in the writing process. The sense of mutual humiliation that pervades the scene is kept as measured and subtle as the couple’s hurt whispers. The off-hand intellectual egotism Woody and his character both blatantly share is quashed by the distance his screenwriter-self keeps from overplaying his binding centrality in the story and scene. As a true Socratic thinker and Freudian his detached observation of his own innate immaturity simultaneously destroys his character’s pretension to moral authority and allows us, through this decentrement, to finally see Tracy the way Isaac obviously doesn’t: as a precocious and intellectually independent woman. In short, any actor could have played Isaac, but the fact that Woody himself does only further displays how averse he can be at his best to characteristic bullshit. This is perhaps why the film itself ends with Tracy’s advice to him to “[h]ave a little faith in people.” It’s often too easy to see through our friends and lovers, though in doing so it’s equally simple to forget how easily they can see through us too. Manhattan is thus literally a case study in the neurotic empathy of screenwriting: one even suspects Woody of ultimately being more on Tracy’s side than his own avatar’s.

Word Count: 1075

3. It comes to mind that a reversed ‘Americana’ version of this scene appears as the malt shop courtship process in the second act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town: an (appropriately age-gapped and embarrassingly nervous) high-school couple in a rural hamlet confesses their mutual lasting love over milkshakes…