LOUIS AND WOODY: What’s the way forward for an exposed creep?

So why did Woody Allen make Irrational Man? The answer seems to be that it was time to make a movie. As Allen himself describes it, a major reason he makes movies in the first place is to beguile the time and distract himself from the meaninglessness of existence. Irrational Man is a film about a man who commits murder in order to be able to reliably have an erection, made by a man who claims to make movies not so much to feel alive as to avoid feeling the approach of death. And not once in this highly detailed book about the making of the movie does Allen or his amanuensis note the irony or how the film failed to mine that irony for the black comedy that could have been.

Take Allen at his word, and say it is meaninglessness he is fleeing. Filmmaking is certainly engrossing enough to distract one from much else. Even the tedium (and there is a vast amount of tedium in filmmaking) is engrossing, energizing, the “hurry up and wait” of a battlefield but without the physical casualties. But I can’t shake the feeling, from reading this book, that it is casualties of another sort—the emotional casualties of broken relationships and of the ongoing battle with oneself—that he is truly fleeing; not the meaninglessness of life, but what its meaning is, at least for him.

In other words, Woody Allen has turned into precisely what it looks like Glen has turned into at the end of Louis C.K.’s film, I Love You, Daddy: a talented craftsman who is no longer a great artist, who must keep writing and directing because that’s just what you do—because you have to work or you’ll be left alone with nothing but yourself.

Sort of like a dead shark, as Alvy Singer would say.