'Irrational Man'

Philosophy As Enabling Bullshit

It's very hard to figure where Woody Allen posits classical and traditional Western Philosophy in his life. His earliest writings crack jokes about Plato ("He used to knock over little boys. What the hell would he know?") and even Kant's moral imperative ("if we all behave that way, willI get to eat my lunch and keep it?"). This fixation has wound its way through his career as plenty of punchlines were dished out at the expense of Socrates through to Heidegger at various junctures. It's worth wondering just how seriously he takes it if he wants to so talk about it. After all, his famous joke goes he was flunked from college in a metaphysics test when during an exam, he turned to the boy next to him and looked into his soul.

Here, with 'Irrational Man', we finally get the pastiche philosophical patter rolled into the dialogue of one character, The results are quite funny and funny because they are awkward, but also because what happens is in a way Woody Allen's admission that he holds no hope in philosophy. Maybe that's a good thing.

Spoiler alert as usual.


What's Good About It

In Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix, Woody Allen has two great actors who can carry the lines with adroitness and gusto. The two of them make hefty words sing as ordinary dialogue. It's quite the accomplishment. Woody Allen's dialogue doesn't seem to be getting easier in his old age. His recent films have been filled with difficult turns of phrases with demands for expert comic timing. As the film consists of many scenes that are two handers and three handers featuring the two, it is striking just how good Stone and Phoenix are in their respective roles.

Woody Allen's mordant wit is a kind of elaborate gallows humour, but he does a great job of holding off his plot twist. He is a magnificent writer of dialogue and excellent observer of character - he sure has the mettle of his men and women measured down pat. I wonder if a hundred years from now, people will watch his films and grapple with the vocabulary and the interchangeable vernacular of modernity and classical thought as expressed in a varsity context. He captures the anxious speech of educated people so well.

What's Bad About It

Maybe Woody Allen is getting a little tired of the philosophy jokes themselves. If there is a single failing in his portrayal of character, it is that Phoenix's philosophy professor whois so deep in despair seems to be getting through the basic curriculum fairly breezily. It is basic sort of stuff, but he seems all too at ease with the dispensing of pedagogy.

Also the snippets of philosophy he teaches come across as cribbed notes and not very interesting. Maybe it's meant to show just how bored Phoenix's character Abe Lucas is with the framework and historic context Western Philosophy, but it comes over as way too glib. As one drop out to another, it makes me want to say, "well, hold up right there. That's totally an un-nuanced view of..." That's bad writing.

Similarly, his presentation of Emma Stone's Jill as being fundamentally middle-class and therefore unable to escape her own class prejudices is a harsh assessment of her character. After all, his film is positing an extraordinary position where murder might be acceptable. For a film that wants to show the attempt to transcend moral concerns of the bourgeoisie, it takes a harsh stance on the very same moral framework that allows the plot to turn.

What's Interesting About It

It's interesting that Philosophy is at the centre of this film, which is at its core a simple yarn about an attempt at a perfect crime. It's couched in terms of philosophy exactly because it serves to obfuscate the motive for the crime. Much like 'Throw Mama From The Train', the central point of getting away with the perfect crime, resides eliminating motive. And just as 'Throw Mama From the Train' works very hard to establish the ground rules as to why the motive needs to be eliminated for the perfect crime, this film posits that a man can arrive at the point of enacting a crime through philosophy, and because he does so through his philosophical excursion, he would be able to obscure his motive substantially as to make it look like there is no motive.

When one casts one mind to it, if a murder is completely without motive, it suggests the work of a psycho-killer; and such movies have a particular tenor that leads to detective fiction. Abe Lucas has a motive, and it is to do one deed that would have a positive impact on somebody he overheard in a cafe. It's arguable whether it is a strong enough motive to lead a man to murder somebody he doesn't really know.

On one level, for all the exposition that Abe is a brilliant philosopher, if all it leads to is this crime, then either we're being sold a crock or philosophy is a crock. This being Woody Allen writing and directing, we're given the slanted evidence that it is philosophy that is bullshit. Mind you, a lot of philosophy scholars I know have ended up in pedagogy of said bullshit, so much so that I'm even inclined to believe Woody Allen's dig at a big Western Institution. Nonetheless, I had to say it's probably Woody Allen who is selling a crock of shit in this instance. As fragile and vulnerable it may seem, there's a lot more intellectual muscle in Western Philosophy yet.

Existential Despair As Plaything

Finding tenure as a philosophy tutor in this day and age has to be pretty cool when you think about it. Abe's philosophical predicament of existential despair is actually a little unrealistic. Most PhD. grads I know who have done philosophy would love exactly that job. If there's one job that a philosophy major would not feel existential despair would actually be holding a chair in academia as a philosopher. There are many kinds of conditions of existence which induce the kind of nausea or despair that existentialists of old may have written about, but being a philosophy academic is not one of them. Complaining about that condition of life is a bit like complaining about being a rock star or a movie director. If anything, it's like Larry David's never-ending complaints in 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'.

Still, it's one of Woody Allen's tropes whereby the main character is tormented. When it is Sean Penn playing a tormented guitar player in the 1920s, feeling outshone by Django Reinhardt, that's one kind of torture; but some of the other roles would invite the suspicion that these characters were posturing wankers rather than genuinely beset by existential despair. It's rather unclear where Woody Allen stands on the very topic because he's made so many jokes about it, at its expense and his own expense. Judging from this film, there are no new breakthroughs in his thinking - although the fact that he is able mount these discourses as grim black humour without inserting himself as a character shows that he's generalising his theory of existential despair as a plaything for the bored.

The Older Man, The Ingenue

Woody Allen's other trope for which he gets a lot of flack is the older man and younger woman set up. It recurs in his work because, seemingly, it's the only understanding of relationships he has any more. Oddly enough, because he writes it so often, he has written so many versions and inversions of this relationship dynamic, he's certainly the expert.

At least he's stopped casting himself as the older man, and the movies are better off for that.