An Admission of Superficial Prior Exposure

Once upon a time (in 2005) I spent a not inconsiderable amount of money on a ticket to see Match Point. This was the first time I had ever watched a Woody Allen film in its entirety. I wish I could say that this experience stirred in me a deep appreciation of Woody Allen's work and genius, but... well, it didn't. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie, but it didn't inspire any strong desire to expand my exposure to this neurotic bespectacled New Yorker's oeuvre. As of today, my familiarity with the canon of Allen's work is limited to this one past movie-going experience and some incidental exposure to a handful of televised clips from Annie Hall, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), and Bullets Over Broadway. My experience of Woody Allen has been superficial, to say the least. Further, the deepest impact this experience has had on me thus far has only manifested in a vague sense that Diane Keaton's fashion sense has been somehow either irretrievably damaged or profoundly retarded by her role in Annie Hall. This is all about to change...

The purpose and focus of this blog is the exploration and analysis of the films and influences of Woody Allen. This blog will be devoted to Woody Allen and his body of work. The blogs content will include direct analysis of Allen's films and writing, as well as tangential discussions of art and other films.

And now, to finish up, here's one of my favorite Woody Allen clips, which I am sure everyone and their mother has seen at this point:


What I find particularly interesting about this clip is how pervasive the tendency to anthropomorphize spermatazoa is in American culture, whether it be in the gendered rhetoric used to describe reproductive cells in even some scientific literature, in the vernacular use of terms like "the boys" or"swimmers,"or in popular culture representations, such as the talking sperm and egg in Look Who's Talking. There are also echoes of Allen's own anthro-sperm, as seen in this contemporary condom commercial :


Well, that's all for now. More to come next week on the "Oedipal Allen"

ETA: my Netflix queue is now swollen with Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman films, because I am a completist, and don't want to write about films I haven't seen in their entirety. :)