The Farenheit 451 Addendum

I've been skimming some old notes on Foucault, after finishing reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and it occurred to me that in my previous post I failed to touch on power/knowledge in Foucault's theories. Obviously, when applied to an educational (or rehabilitative) institution, the observers of the panopticon acquire control over the establishment of norms, knowledge, and the very definition of truth. Although thus far the panopticon has been discussed on this blog as a simple punitive and observational tool, it is critical to remember the important social role this level of control and observation can have when writ large on an entire society. The panopticon allows for a very strict control of academic discourse, controlling people through what they know, and ultimately controlling not necessarily which knowledge is dispersed, but certainly how it is understood and valued.

This last point, that the power over the use of cultural/academic knowledge grants significant power to the "observer" seems to me particularly relevant to Fahrenheit 451. By manipulating the social value of literature vs. "the relatives" and other frivolous entertainments, the governing body in Fahrenheit ensures a docile, biddable populace. The majority in Fahrenheit have deliberately been taught to devalue knowledge and to actively avoid critical thought. As Beatty explains it "if you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Or better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war," fill the people's head with meaningless trivia "then they’ll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving" (61). By emphasizing trivialities over deeper knowledge, the government, and the educational institutions, of this future distract and pacify the populace, effectively handicapping civilian "thought" by removing the knowledge power base.

Another interesting evidence of a panoptic education system at work in Fahrenheit 451 is Beatty's speech on the equalizing goal of the system. "We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against" (58). This speech is an expression of Beatty's, and his society's, "understandable and rightful dread of being inferior" (59). This kind of equalization is the bread and butter of a panoptic educational system, standardizing and equalizing academic achievement, in this case catering to the lowest common denominator. All are observed to the point of paranoid obedience, and the common man's knowledge power base is deflated.

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work Cited
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine, 1991. Print.

I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me: Zelig and the Panopticon

Michel Foucault’s concept of the panopticon explores the efficacy of punitive observation. This concept can be expanded to apply not only to prisons and other institutions, but to society as a whole. Inspired by the design of a new prison, which entailed a ring of isolated cells surrounding a central guard tower, the panopticon presents a constant state of surveillance as an effective controlling device for the management of prisoners, students, employees, patients, etc. The system casts its participants as all either observers or the observed.

In Woody Allen’s film Zelig, the protagonist, Leonard Zelig, is arguably cast in both roles; he is both the subject of observation as well as an observer. In the first role, as the observed, Zelig is a mental patient, studied ferociously and displayed to the public as spectacle. His behavior is quite literally determined by this observation, as his own awareness of being observed triggers the very behavior which renders Zelig the subject of study. Zelig is a social chameleon, and his feelings of personal inadequacy drive him to literally transform himself physically into a facsimile of his observer. Zelig is hyper aware of the gaze of others, and driven by this awareness he is constantly remaking himself to satisfy that gaze. As Foucault explains it, “full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.” This could not be more true for Leonard Zelig: constantly being under the gaze of others, being fully and constantly exposed to observation effectively traps Zelig in the very cycle of chameleon behavior which all of the observation is allegedly meant to cure, and in the variety of changes he undertakes to protect himself from the gaze of others, Zelig could very well people every cell of the panopticon by himself. Further, as the object of observation, Zelig’s experience quite clearly exemplifies Foucault’s assertion that “our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance.” In the film, watching Zelig becomes a national pastime. This voyeuristic pop culture fixation with the trials of one sad little man clearly present the tawdry, peeping-tom surveillance entertainment potential provided by the panopticon. Zelig is not a spectacle, but a minor oddity, and his deeply personal struggle for identity becomes the focus of his observers’ entertainment base, his medical history and the results of his psychological tests making front page news.

It is worth noting, as I mentioned previously, that Leonard Zelig effectively fills both roles in the panopticon throughout the course of the film. Although he is himself constantly observed and turned into the focal point of a culture of surveillance, he is also constantly observing his observers, as evidenced by his manifestations of them in his own body. Without being an observer himself, Zelig would have no one to become, no persona to paste over his own “inferior” self. It is not insignificant that Zelig is placed at the center of the action of the film, literally embodying all those whom he observes. Proximity and mimicry of his observers allows Zelig to become the center of a secondary panopticon, seeing all and remaining unseen. Leonard’s genuine personal identity is largely ignored as a kind of interlimnal state between transitions by his observers and is largely dismissed as irrelevant when compared to his chameleon behavior and the entertainment value of his medical trials, so the real Leonard Zelig becomes a kind of unseen observer in the tower.

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Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. NY: Vintage Books 1995. Web.

Zelig. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Woody Allen, Mia Farrow. MGM, 1983. DVD.

The Void and the Narcissist in the Mirror: The Creation of Identity in Zelig and American Psycho

EDIT 4/12/10: Here is the final draft of my paper on identity in Zelig and American Psycho. Hurray, huzzah, enjoy.

“There will be time, there will be time / to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; / there will be time to murder and create, / and time for all the works and days of hands / that lift and drop a question on your plate; / time for you and time for me” (Eliot, lines 26-31). One of the major struggles of modern life is the quest for a genuine self-identity. This quest is complicated by the need for the kind of socially acceptable illusory self-identification described by T.S. Eliot as “a face to meet the faces.”Although most people at least partially resolve this quest, ultimately coming to an understanding of the self and the social constructs which govern the expression of personal identity, some continue to struggle well into adulthood. These individuals can often become fixated on external influences in their understanding of self, a fixation which results in incomplete or false identities, identities wholly dependent on superficial cues for definition. They become the “face,” the mask, without any specific underlying individual identity to hang upon. This struggle for a cohesive and genuine individual identity is one of the central themes of both Woody Allen’s film, Zelig and Mary Harron’s film American Psycho. In both narratives, the protagonists, Leonard Zelig and Patrick Bateman, are men with incomplete or inauthentic personalities which they derive from observation of others. They are fractured selves, and constantly create and recreate themselves based upon external influences.

This self-conceptualization based upon the characters’ perceptions of “the other” and the illusion of “self” represents a constant re-performance of the mirror stage of development and stunts their ultimate evolution into fully integrated individual personalities. Neither man is capable of perceiving himself as a genuine and individual entity autonomous from “the other”, and so both characters constantly struggle with the concept of a genuine self. Both men settle for illusory “mirror” selves rather than acknowledging or creating a true sense of identity. The mirrored image of each man is only an illusion of a cohesive persona, and because they both remain fixated on that illusion, they are unable to evolve a sense of genuine selfhood to supplant the superficial identity which the mirror provides. These men constantly return to the mirror, the other, the “face”, in order to define themselves because they are unable to let go of their pleasing and comforting illusions.

Leonard Zelig is a chameleon, a man who takes on the identities of those surrounding him, even replicating their appearance in his own body. Zelig has seen the mirror, and that mirror is other people; that mirror is he. Leonard is incapable of perceiving only himself in the mirror, and instead fixates on reflecting the “reflections” of others. He is constantly changing, adapting to his surroundings and creating illusory selves which merely mimic the superficial identities of those around him. The man defines himself only in relation to others, and subsumes any shred of “Leonard” to the assumption of the “Selves” of others. As Richard Feldstein puts it in his essay “The Dissolution of the Self in Zelig,” “this narcissistic tendency of seeing the other as a simulacrum indissociable from the self is a malady that leads to an endless reduplification from which Zelig’s hybrid self is constituted. Consequently, Leonard discounts himself and takes the ego of the other as the locus of truth” (157). Essentially, Leonard Zelig is stuck in the mirror stage, looking to others, to external reflections of identity, to see himself. His inability to detach his understanding of himself from his conception of others results in a series of dramatic chameleon-like shifts; Leonard’s identity is superficial and transitory, shifting with every new face that crosses his mirror. Leonard’s mirror is the world, and he is too caught up in putting on camouflage personas to become a complete and individual “self”. In a way, Zelig is a void, an empty shell desperately in search of an identity, ANY identity to either fill him or at least mask his emptiness, a kind of personality vacuum. Leonard does not know himself, or is dissatisfied with the image of himself which he has seen, and so he sucks in and assimilates the external identities of others.

In contrast to Leonard Zelig, Patrick Bateman, the central figure of the film American Psycho, is an aggressive and violent pathological narcissist, rather than simply an identity vacuum. He exhibits a “grandiose sense of self importance or uniqueness and preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success and power; hypersensitivity to criticism; and a lack of empathy”, and has an all consuming need for attention and validation, success and infamy (Post 100). However, it is important to note that despite this narcissistic self-obsession, Bateman does not perceive his idol, himself, as a genuine entity, saying of himself that:

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there.

It is interesting to consider that as Patrick speaks these lines, he is facing a bathroom mirror, peeling off a cosmetic face mask. Patrick is suggesting that his entire being is a series of masks, of performances, and that he defines himself both literally and figuratively by these appearances, rather than any genuine, substantial individual conception of “self.” He is quite literally cultivating the “face to meet the faces”. Bateman casts all of his own actions and appearances as façade, as illusion, and in a way, even his narcissism can be read as an illusion, a performance rather than a reality, since Bateman himself believes there is no real Bateman over whom to obsess. Therefore, narcissistic obsession presents a strange dichotomy in Bateman, in that he is simultaneously obsessed with himself and convinced of his own non existence and irrelevance as an individual.

Much like Zelig, Bateman creates his false selves based upon external influences, constructing temporary identities supported and inspired by his own perception of the “other”. However, unlike Zelig, Bateman appears from the first to be completely aware of this. It is immensely ironic that, as he discusses his own lack of a genuine identity, Bateman literally enacts Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage” of development, a theoretical stage during which, according to J. Laplanche, upon observing themselves in a mirror for the first time, a child “sees an invented image and falsely takes this reflection as the first illustration of a unified concept” (qtd. in Feldstein 155). As he describes his own lack of genuine identity, Bateman is actively “inventing” a cohesive image of himself through the mirror, fully acknowledging his own awareness of the falseness of this self-identity. Bateman creates himself as the ideal (or at least, what he perceives as the ideal, which ideal is ironically the theoretical product of the mirror stage): the perfect rat in the race for yuppie success, meticulously maintaining his appearance and ferociously competing with the other rats in business suits for the prestige of being the best and brightest, the holder of the most tasteful business card, the name on the reservation at the best restaurant, and the beau of the most attractive woman. This creation and acquisitiveness is informed by Bateman’s perception of those around him and his observation of yuppie culture, rather than any genuine desire on his part for the things themselves. Further, Bateman does not believe in the individual, and so he is constantly assembling the “face” to mask his own identity void, and in classic narcissistic fashion, he conflates his own lack of genuine identity with the same lack in others, seeing others “as extensions of the self, who are there only to supply admiration and gratification” (Post 103). This refusal to acknowledge others as beings separate from himself allows him to murder without any compunction, as he doesn’t see others as any more “real” than he. At one point, Patrick even goes so far as to take on the identity of one of his victims, Paul Allen. Patrick himself is all façade, and he believes others to be equally illusory and empty, so assuming the murdered man’s identity is no different than putting on any of the other “faces” Bateman has created for himself. No one is real to Bateman, including himself, and so he sees no compelling reason, even self-preservation, to curb his murderous inclinations.

Ultimately, neither Zelig nor Bateman has a clear and real idea of self, and so both become nothing more than a collection of social masks. Neither man completes the mirror stage of their development, and so neither has a conception of the self as a complete and individual entity, truly independent of others. However, this unachieved realization of identity is itself based upon an illusion, the appearance of the self in the mirror, rather than a genuine complex self-conceptualization. In a way, it could be argued that no one truly overcomes this problematic oasis view of identity: in some small way, most people remain concerned with appearances and social convention to the detriment of genuine self-expression and identification. The true self remains an unachieved, and unachievable, ideal. It is all too easy for those already struggling to find a genuine individual identity to simply acquire a mask of social acceptability to conceal their own emptiness, as Leonard Zelig and Patrick Bateman do. When the self is utterly subsumed to these external social cues, void personalities, like Zelig and Bateman, become the blank slate upon which more acceptable “faces” are hung. Granted, both of these men take on these masks for arguably very different reasons, but it is worthwhile to note that both take on these illusory identities as a means of protecting and concealing themselves. Neither man can comfortably confront their genuine self within the confines of society, and so Zelig buries his true self, while Bateman denies his own genuine existence altogether, becoming nothing beyond or beneath the many masks he creates for himself.

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Works Cited

American Psycho. Dir. Mary Harron. Perf. Christian Bale. Lions Gate, 2000. DVD.

Eliot, T.S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Vol. D. Boston: Wadsworth, 2006. 1583-6. Print. 5 vols.

Feldstein, Richard. “The Dissolution of the Self in Zelig”. Literature and Film Quarterly 13.3 (1985):155-60. Print.

Post, Jerrold M. “Current Concepts of the Narcissistic Personality: Implications for Political Psychology.” Political Psychology 14.1 (Mar. 1993): 99-121. JSTOR. Web. 23 Mar. 2010.

Zelig. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Woody Allen, Mia Farrow. MGM, 1983. DVD.

Manhattan: I Hate Tracy, and "Where the Wild Things Are"

I have a problem with “Manhattan.” Yes, a problem. I hate Tracy. There, I said it. I HATE Tracy. She’s a doormat, and in the cast of kooky, over the top Allen archetypes, Mariel Hemingway’s performance is too subtle and underplayed for my tastes. She sticks out like a boring, strong-jawed 17 year old thumb. I cannot understand why she got so much acclaim for this role. She seems to me to be so out of place and miscast. Her subtlety was jarring, rather than affecting, and somewhat disingenuous. She’s supposed to be so mature and adult, the most grown up person in the film, some may argue, and yet her blind, inexplicable pursuit of Allen’s Isaac played to me as childish, almost as needy and ridiculous as any other character in the film, but less likeable, despite her (significantly fewer) faults.

So what did I like about Manhattan? The deeply flawed, selfish monsters that comprise the rest of the cast. And I do mean monsters. Manhattan, to me, is almost Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” played out in black and white by scrawny children in intellectual drag. All of the characters are self-centered creatures, fixated on pleasure and image, myopically focused on satisfying their vicious, childish urges. Isaac is having sex with a child, Mary wants to be the big, brilliant kid on the playground, and Yale… well, Yale is Max, the self-centered King of his own wild Manhattan jungle. Yale bangs around the city utterly using and destroying everyone around him without a care, beyond his deep concern for his own happiness. He cheats on his wife with Mary, really indifferent to the pain this may cause her. He dumps Mary and foists her off on Isaac, disposing of her, in kingly fashion, and bestowing his sloppy seconds on his vassal, pathetic little Isaac. And then! Once Isaac has dumped Tracy (and good riddance, I say) and found relative happiness with Mary, Yale takes Mary back, uncaring for his “friend’s” feeling on the matter. Yale hurts Isaac, steals his second-hand woman, and his response, when Isaac calls him on it, is essentially schoolyard “nananabooboo, I saw her first!”

Manhattan is the picturesque monster island on which debauched Yale reigns as king, and his monstrous vassals, Mary, Isaac, et all, happily dance to his direction, mating and splitting, in Isaac and Mary’s case, at Yale’s whim.

Art, or Something Like It

“The age demanded an image/ Of its accelerated grimace” Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", lines 21 & 22

Most scholars agree that industrialization had a major effect on both the production of “art” and “mass culture.” This shift seems to have resulted in a lot of derivative, and some would say inferior, popular art, the kind of “art” which Pound would likely call disposable and reprehensible. The interesting question in all of this analysis is what precisely constitutes “art” in this new culture of consumption and mass production.

This question can productively be applied to the art of social realist Ben Shahn. Shahn was an immigrant and trained in lithography and graphic design. Although he did pursue “modern art” in his earlier career, he later turned to a more realistic style in order to better contribute to social and cultural critique. It is interesting to note that Shahn also worked for the government, painting murals which were intended as supportive propaganda for federal relief programs, a project which allowed federally sanctioned vent for Shahn’s social criticism.

In his painting Farmers, Shahn represents 3 men, farm workers. The misery and hardship of their lives in clear in the men’s grim expressions, but interestingly the piece contains no overt sign of the cause of the men’s discontent. The painting was created in concert with the efforts of the FSA to record the plight of American farm workers.

Shahn’s work is usually in forms which are accessible to the public, either in the form of murals or easily reproduced poster work. Shahn’s art is clearly not avant-garde as Clement Greenberg defines it in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”; the pieces are not art for art’s sake, and are designed for the consumption of the masses, placed as they are in common public venues. They are clearly art with a social purpose, and a very clearly defined subject matter. Further, his art is more easily uinderstood than Picasso’s, in that he is slightly more realistic in his imagery and presentation, so it could be said that Shahn's work “predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art.” The whys and wherefores are not immediately clear, but the genral discontent of the farmers is obvious, so the viewer need not struggle for the piece's meaning. The content and intent of the piece are immediately clear and accessible, essentially painted in the vernacular: the imagery is familiar, drawn from the lives of the very people it is meant to affect. The image is realistic in its representation and takes as its subject matter the common man and his struggles, a subject which should be immediately clear to his target audience: the working man and those sympathetic to, or at least concerned with, his plight.

Further, because Shahn’s works are drawn in a realistic style which borrows from graphic design, and because they are placed for broad public/social access, they essentially combat and/or address the mass culture product which Theodor Adorno is so wary of. Shahn uses the style of mass media, poster art and graphic design, to address and combat the oppression which Adorno feels is so native to mass culture productions. Adorno describes popular culture as a meal at which “ the diner must be satisfied with the menu. . . . Of course works of art were not sexual exhibitions either. However, by representing deprivation as negative, they retracted, as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what was denied.” Popular culture is all empty promises and no substance, a distraction from the very real deprivations of modern life, and Shahn’s work, as art, delivers real substance and critique while clothed in a kind of popular drag.

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Marxists.org. Web. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm

Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Sharecom.ca. Web. http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html

Pound, Ezra. "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Wadsworth, 2006. Print.

Shahn, Ben. "Farmers." Painting.

Run Fat Boy, Run: Smutty Jokes and Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud suggests that “throughout the whole range of the psychology of the neuroses, what is sexual includes what is excremental, and is understood in the old, infantile, sense,” and further, that jokes which treat upon these primal sexual fascinations, being tendentious jokes, that is, jokes with larger intent, must be “either a hostile joke (serving the purpose of aggressiveness, satire, or defense) or an obscene joke (serving the purpose of exposure)” (116, 115). Given this framework for understanding puerile humor, I have chosen to examine the comedy of the film “Run Fat Boy, Run,” which is primarily physical and excremental. In the film, stunted man-boy Dennis, having run away from adulthood and commitment, literally fleeing his own wedding, takes on a quest for manhood by signing up to run the London River Run marathon with only a few weeks of preparation. Unfit, slovenly, and a frequent smoker, (clearly suffering from some setbacks during his oral phase of development) Dennis first takes on this challenge in a juvenile attempt to one-up his former fiancée’s new man, but through the course of the film the race, and Dennis’ preparation for it, becomes a very real catalyst for Dennis’ evolution from juvenile lay-about to responsible adult. Most germane to the purposes of this discussion is how obscene, exposing, and sexual humor is used throughout the film to evoke laughter.


This film is riddled with excremental and smutty humor, lousy with fart jokes, sexual innuendo, simulated ejaculation and masturbation, and emasculation by way of a speedy transvestite. In one of the early scenes, Dennis, a security guard for an upscale women’s lingerie boutique, is shown running down a shoplifting transvestite. As if being the guardian of fancy women’s under-things were not sufficiently emasculating, one of the audience’s first experiences of Dennis is watching him being outrun by a giggling, taunting transvestite, who gleefully cavorts and flaunts her frilly stolen knickers in Dennis’ face, just out of reach. Leaving aside any questions of the figuratively castrating effect of being unmanned by a transvestite, the obvious sexual overtones of the scene elevate it to a greater level of arguably both hostile and obscene tendentious humor. In this case, Dennis is the object of the joke, despite Freud’s assertions that a woman is generally the primary object, and the transvestite is exposing both Dennis’ shortcomings as a man and guardian of women’s unmentionables, as well as quite literally exposing a pair of pretty panties (arguably this exposure does frame women as a secondary object of the joke). This exposure makes Dennis both pitiable and laughable, allowing the audience to acquire a kind of release of primal aggressive urges through the safe, culturally sanctioned mockery of Dennis. As Freud writes “the repressive activity of civilization brings it about that primary possibilities of enjoyment, which have now, however, been repudiated by the censorship in us, are lost to us . . . so we find that tendentious jokes provide a means of undoing the renunciation and retrieving what was lost” (120-21). Essentially, hostile, puerile humor allows people to vent the frustrations and inexpressible baser urges which must be suppressed in order to cultivate civilization. Therefore, by causing the audience to laugh at Dennis’ emasculation, his many pratfalls, and the physical suffering and abuse he takes throughout the film, the comedy of “Run Fat Boy, Run” allows people a minor kind of relief from the repression of socially unacceptable urges.


Another excellent, though rather disgusting, example of the base humor of “Run Fat Boy, Run” can be observed in the well-known blister popping scene. The scene is disgusting and childish, as well as cringe inducing. As Freud says, “the technique of such jokes is often quite wretched, but they have immense success in provoking laughter” (Freud 121). This joke employs a handful of smutty themes to create a disgusting, and therefore both hilarious and horrifying, joke. The gag is hostile, in that a large part of the humor comes from Dennis’ pain and his friend’s reaction to that pain, as well as sexual: after the blister has been popped, pus is discharged into the friend’s face, which leads to a premature ejaculation joke, as well as an allusion to seminal fluid in the eye. Further, this sexual joke has a hostile element, because the scene involves two men, and therefore lends the joke a homosexual overtone. Because of this multi-layered gag, this joke allows the audience to laugh not only at Dennis’ real physical pain from the blister and preparation for the race, but also at the implied sexual inadequacy, which satisfies both the infantile fascination with the sexual as well as the suppressed human drive for aggression against one another. The joke exposes Dennis, in several senses. Further, the scene employs a kind of slapstick humor, which is pervasive throughout the film, and echoes the physical humor present in old school Chaplin or Stooges routines, only the pie or seltzer water in the face has been replaced by… well, pus.

(seriously, this scene is gross. Consider yourself warned.)


The primary source of humor in “Run Fat Boy, Run” is the juvenile fascination with sex and pain. Throughout the film, Dennis, the protagonist, is continually exposed and emasculated, an exposure which allows the audience to vent their own suppressed hostility and puerile fascinations. Fortunately, the distinction between humor of this type in film, directed and inspired by the suffering and shortcomings of a fictional character, and the same humor derived in real life from the suffering of real people, is that the hostile, exposing need can be relieved without a living target, and therefore is a kind of victimless “crime”, offering all of the vindictive enjoyment, without any real harm or insult.





Work Cited
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Norton, 1989. Print.

Seriously, When Are You Going to Give Me Some Grandchildren?

The archetypal Jewish mother and her often contradictory traits (her excessive love, smothering pride, embarrassing cultural rigidity, and withering disappointment) have become a major trope in contemporary entertainment, particularly in the work of Jewish comics. As Martha A. Ravits suggests in the essay “The Jewish Mother: Comedy and Controversy in American Popular Culture,” this stereotypic figure functions both as a kind of in for Jewish artists to mainstream (white) mass culture, as well as a projection of their own unease and cultural/personal insecurities. This larger than life mother figure becomes a kind of scapegoat, onto which the comic can safely project his own unease over his at times almost liminal role in modern culture, his guilt both for assimilating and abandoning older cultural models, as well as for failing to assimilate enough to attain the ideal of American success. The Jewish mother stereotype becomes not only a filter for the Jewish comic’s self-loathing and fears, but also a personification of his ambiguous relationship with popular culture. Therefore, although this portrayal of Jewish mothers, and mothers or women in general, is blatantly misogynistic, it is more important, when examining her role, to question what she represents of her creator’s own shortcomings and insecurities.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Woody Allen has repeatedly used or referenced this behemoth of ethnic parental stereotyping. In Allen’s landmark film, Annie Hall, several scenes center on flashback visitations of protagonist Alvy Singer’s childhood home. In these flashbacks, Alvy’s mother screeches at Alvy, his father, and other family members, demanding that Alvy become a better son, a higher achiever, and a good Jewish boy (in one scene, Alvy’s family is transposed against Annie’s Norman Rockwellian family ham dinner. Alvy’s family declares, when asked, that they fast for holidays, to absolve themselves of sins which they themselves cannot name). Much like Alexander Portnoy’s mother in Portnoy’s Complaint, Alvy’s mother is a major figure in all of Alvy’s recollections of early life. She looms large, much like the roller coaster Alvy’s family home is situated beneath. The roller coaster itself is a very interesting metaphoric expansion of the Jewish mother: it is a howling, ever-changing, rattling monster looming over every moment of young Alvy’s life, a colossal, oppressive and omnipresent mother hen, literally perched above Alvy as he grows up, rattling his nerves and destroying any peace in the household. Not only does Allen’s Alvy have a literal Jewish mother to heckle him and push him into deep neurosis, he also has the mommy-coaster literally shattering his nerves throughout his early life.

Of course, in using the Jewish mother trope, even expanding it into the roller coaster metaphor, Allen, or at least Alvy, is largely projecting his own insecurities and expiating his personal guilt over his own shortcomings and interpersonal failings. Rather than address his own part in the shambles of his life and relationships, Alvy retreats into mother blame, and “Jew” blame; of course he can’t fit in Annie’s family, he’s a Jew, and her Grammy is a “Jew-hater.”

Interestingly, Ravits proposes that the Jewish mother stereotype is a way for Jewish comics to transition into, and connect with, a wider audience. The stereotype functions as a way of distancing the comic from that which his audience may dislike about “Jews,” and renders him acceptable, different. It also creates a sense of camaraderie: “we’re all in this together, laughing at this silly backwards woman.”