关于伍迪艾伦的一切（6/7）
（6/7）
Allen admits that such lines are made of barbed wire. "I write comically because things look that way to me," he says. "But I'm deadly serious. I don't watch funny movies; I watch Ingmar Bergman. He's concerned with the silence of God, and in some small way, so am I. I keep watching movies like The Seventh Seal or Shame again and again and again." Indeed, as Actor Wilder recalls the making of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, "it was like walking on a Bergman set, people talking in whispers, serious looks on Woody's face. He communicates through silence."
Sometimes the shadow of Bergman is unrecognizably fitted with cap and bells. In Bananas, Allen's most personal film, two groups of cloaked mourners carrying crucified figures from some penitential Latin ritual vie for the same parking space; the solemnity of the processional dissolves into a hilarious brawl. The devout might wince at the seeming irreverence, but everything is insultable in Allen's anything-for-a-one-liner aesthetic. The script's most outrageous joke has a buxom black woman taking the stand and giving her name: "J. Edgar Hoover." "I didn't have that joke until the woman came in for casting," recalls Allen. "She looked like Hoover, so I wrote it in." Funny. Yet, as Nietzsche observed, a joke is an epitaph on an emotion. In the Allen oeuvre, there is sometimes a certain lack of real feeling, a casual and unconsidered irreverence that sows salt in its own turf.
Sex Comedy. Allen simply cannot leave sacred cows unbutchered. Sometimes he is killingly funny: other times, he is overkillingly vulgar. He is likely to be considered both, with Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. "It's the first real sex comedy," he says. "I don't think Pillow Talk or // Happened One Night are sex comedies. I'm talking about everything from achieving orgasm to homosexuality to prostitution. In this movie we go outside, through, around and inside the body. I may never get another date."
A recent film asked the question: Is There Sex after Death? For Allen, the interrogation should be reversed. Will there be Death after Sex?
"Well—in a way," he answers. "This summer, for the first time in my life, I'm going to write a deadly serious play —a pure drama."
At this, the Allenite experiences an involuntary shudder. When the clown plays Hamlet, the experience is almost invariably catastrophic. And when he writes it... Is this the end of the paranoid's paranoid?
"Woody will never let go of the comic character," predicts his pal Dick Cavett. "Of all the things he's worked on, the one that took the most energy and revision was his own stand-up routine. And he never turns off his comic mind. We can be talking away at a cash register after lunch and he'll start scribbling a new one-liner on the back of the check." Besides, Woody couldn't stop being funny if he wanted to. No one watching him in Play It Again, Sam as he holds up a record jacket, only to have the LP take off like a Frisbee, can doubt the words of an agent who recently watched Woody trip over his shoelaces on Fifth Avenue. "My God," he said, "he's a natural."