Part 2 on Oedipal Conflict and the Superego
When it came out, Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors shook up many people with its moral challenge, a modern day twist on Crime and Punishment. A wealthy, respected physician arranges the murder of his ex-mistress who is threatening to expose him. Like Raskolnikov, he becomes tormented by conscience and fears of being caught after the crime is committed. The police come to question him about the crime. Unlike Raskolnikov, he endures his guilt and moves on without being discovered. He wrestles with his conscience and wins. The New York Times (Steinfels et.al., 1989) was prompted to publish essays by three theologians about the moral questions addressed in the film. Others felt provoked to review their own indiscretions and their moral code. If good is not rewarded and evil not punished, what is the basis for morality? But hidden in this moral conundrum is a struggle between tyrannical fathers and rebelling children. In fact, the film’s morality is used to help resolve the weak child’s dilemma. In this film, morality offers solace to the weak.
As the film opens, we see a tension between external appearance and inner thoughts. Dr. Judah Rosenthal is the speaker at a black tie charity dinner for his medical center. The man introducing him tells us how the world sees Judah: “We’re all very proud of Judah Rosenthal’s philanthropic efforts, his endless hours of fund raising for the hospital, the new medical center, and now the new ophthalmology wing which until this year had just been a dream. But it’s Judah Rosenthal our friend that we most appreciate—the husband, the father, the golf companion. Naturally, if you have a medical problem, you can call Judah day or night, on weekends or holidays, but you can also call Judah to find out which is the best restaurant in Paris—or Athens—or which hotel to stay in in Moscow, or the best recording of a particular Mozart symphony.”
Judah is a man of the world who has the blessings of wealth, culture, and a valuable role in the community. This is reinforced by the image of him in a tuxedo, accompanied by his family, at an expensive charity dinner. He is a skilled physician, a pillar of the community, and a family man.
But his authority and prestige are immediately undermined. His wife has noticed that he has been preoccupied since earlier in the evening. We are privy to his preoccupation. Judah had found a letter on his coffee table addressed to his wife from his distressed mistress, Dolores Paley. Looking each way as if to see if anyone was watching, he threw the letter into the fireplace. Just as he disposed of the physical evidence, Judah pushes aside his worry and conscience with a joke as he gives his speech at the dinner, saying:
“I’m a man of science. I’ve always been a skeptic, but I was raised quite religiously, and while I challenged it even as a child, some of that feeling must have stuck with me. I remember my father telling me, ‘the eyes of God are on us always’. The eyes of God. What a phrase to a young boy. What were God’s eyes like—unimaginably penetrating, intense eyes I assumed. And I wonder if it was just a coincidence that I made my specialty ophthalmology.”
It is certainly no coincidence for the film. In fact, two of the other central characters are also in an occupation involved with seeing and being seen. They are film makers. Judah’s concern with vision has to do with his need to hide the blemishes to his character. His relationship with his father has left him with a sense of awe and fear of God’s “penetrating, intense eyes” that can see through his subterfuge as other people cannot. Interestingly, the film’s audience is also given this god-like penetrating vision.
Judah’s father’s idea that the eyes of God are watching is close to an important psychoanalytic concept: that the core of our conscience comes from the images of our judging parents that become embedded in our minds. When the boy at five or six comes to terms with the fact that he can’t really compete with his father, he gives up his quest to take his father’s place with his mother. Instead, he begins to identify with his father, to adopt his father’s values and attitudes. He takes his image of his father into his own mind, where the father’s prohibitions and ideals become the core of his conscience. We hold on to our parents in this way, and they are always there watching us. With time, our conscience grows and becomes more independent of our parents’ values, but the core is always with us.
As we shall see, Judah speaks of the eyes of God, but it is his father, still feared and revered, who resides in his mind and watches his every act. It is this father from whom he attempts to hide and from whom he will attempt to gain his freedom. The mature, powerful man that the world sees is still hiding, a small boy who fears his father’s wrath.
Judah’s story is not told in isolation. The film has a second plot that plays with many of the same themes as the first but on a very different level. While Judah and Dolores’ story is told as drama, indeed as tragedy, the story of Cliff, Halley, and Lester is farce, comedy. It is as if we are being given a lighter, comic reflection of the drama that holds center stage. This is announced in the manner in which the film moves from one plot to the other. After we see Dolores arguing with Judah about the promises he has made to her, the hold he has taken on her life, we see a comic scene from a 1930’s movie in which a young woman throws a man out of her luxurious apartment with complaints similar to those Dolores leveled at Judah. “You were gonna wait—and then throw me aside like a squeezed lemon . . . I’d given you the best years of my life and you were willing to go on and on.” The difference is that here the woman is throwing the man out in comic, slapstick style.
This comic shadow of the dramatic scene with Judah and Dolores leads us to the film’s second, comic plot. Here, the same issues that are being dealt with directly in Judah’s story are sidestepped and the tragic consequences become comic embarrassment. Cliff, played by Woody Allen, is watching the comedy with his twelve-year-old niece. As they leave the theater, they are enthusiastic about the film. Cliff says, “That was great wasn’t it, with the tuxedos and the evening gowns? Yeah, and it was wonderful to live like that. This is—awful.”
Cliff is a self styled idealist, a director of commercially unsuccessful documentaries. His clothes and bearing give a sense of a modest man, and we will learn that he has outward scorn for those who sacrifice creativity and ideals for power and money. Here, we learn that despite his espoused idealism, he does admire and envy people in tuxedos and evening gowns, people like Judah and his family in the opening scene. This is important in a film that concerns itself with power—how we get it and hold it, and if we want it.
The two plots unfold side by side. They look quite different and are linked superficially, with the clever segues and one common character, a rabbi, Ben, who is Cliff’s wife’s brother and a patient of Judah Rosenthal. Nevertheless, there are important parallels. Each plot involves a successful man who is highly respected in his community and his family but can be seen by the film’s eye to be more shallow and corrupt. In the tragic plot, it is Judah Rosenthal. In the comic plot, this character is Cliff’s wife’s other brother, Lester, a very successful television producer. Cliff despises Lester’s crass commercialism and laughs at his pomposity. Lester is outrageously pompous. PBS wants to do a documentary about him, and at Cliff’s wife’s request, he invites Cliff to do it. As Cliff is expressing his ambivalence, Lester speaks into the mini-recorder he holds to capture ideas, “Idea for farce: a poor loser agrees to do the story of a great man’s life and in the process comes to learn deep values.”
In the opening scenes, there is a subtle competition between Cliff and Lester for the affection of Wendy, Cliff’s wife and Lester’s sister. Wendy is tired of Cliff not making any money. She is sarcastic about his honorable mention at a Cincinnati documentary festival. She accuses Cliff of being jealous and resentful of her successful brother, Lester. Cliff says to her, the second part under his breath, “I don’t resent him. I just think he’s a pompous ass. You don’t see that because you’re in love with him.”
But as the film develops, Cliff is willing to give up on winning back Wendy’s affection. He sets his sights on a young woman filmmaker, Halley, who is involved in the documentary about Lester. Part of Halley’s appeal is her ability to see through Lester’s attempts to come on to her. She has a ready wit, easily putting Lester in his place. Hopeful that he has found an attractive soul mate who will prove immune to Lester’s charm, Cliff befriends her by appealing to their common interest in old movies and engaging her interest in his own current project, a documentary about a truly great man, an elderly philosopher, Louis Levy, played by the psychoanalyst, Martin Bergmann. After getting Halley back to his studio to show her his footage of Professor Levy, he tells her, “You know I’ve taken an instant liking to you.” She responds, “And I to him,” pointing to the professor on the screen. In effect, while befriending Cliff, Halley admires the father figure. Halley clears the way to help get Cliff’s documentary into the schedule for her PBS series. Cliff tries to draw Halley into making fun of Lester, and warns her to fend off his advances. In fact, we do see Lester chasing a succession of beautiful girls, most of whom seem to be mindless.
While the comic sub-plot concerns itself with sex, the central plot concerns itself with aggression. Dolores becomes increasingly strident and intrusive. She threatens not only to tell Judah’s wife about their affair, but also to let people know about some financial improprieties. Judah seeks advice from Ben, the rabbi, who tells him to be open with his wife. This is not Judah’s style. As Dolores ups the ante, he next turns to his gangster brother. He leads the conversation towards the brother suggesting that Dolores be done away with, then is horrified that his brother can even think such a thing. Finally, Dolores calls Judah in his home during his birthday celebration with his family. She tells him that she is at a nearby gas station and threatens to arrive at his doorstep if he won’t meet her immediately. He sees her and placates her again, but this last threat pushes him to call his brother to arrange to have Dolores killed.
Each of these sub-plots is about a family. All the central characters are family members except for Dolores and Halley. They depend upon their family and its patriarch for their success and well being. Judah and Lester, the patriarchs, take care of the other members of their families and expect to be admired and respected for it. Judah has apparently been generous with his younger brother, and turns to him when he needs dirty work done. Judah’s wife and daughter live in a comfortable, protected world preserved with his money and accomplishments. Lester tries to help his sister by getting Cliff a good, paying job, and later he pays for Ben’s daughter’s wedding.
Cliff will not accept his role in Lester’s family. His own family is not well-to-do and therefore vulnerable. His widowed sister is caught in a perverse date rape, and Cliff is shaken at his inability to protect her. Cliff resents the structure of the family he has married into. Similarly, Dolores challenges her role as an outsider in Judah’s family. She endangers the family structure, committing the unpardonable sin of threatening to disrupt the comfort of the Rosenthal home.
Dolores is an intruder. We are made particularly aware of this when she calls Judah’s home. This is a universal experience. We have all been intruders within a family and we have all been intruded upon. Every child who is born intrudes upon the personal relationships of its parents and siblings; and every child develops a relationship to a mother that is intruded upon by a father and siblings. Freud has captured the impact of that experience in a specific dramatic event—the passive child’s observation of its parents in coitus. He called it the primal scene. Starting with a repetitive dream of a patient in analysis (an eccentric Russian who became known as “The Wolfman” based on wolves in his dream), Freud was able to reconstruct a traumatic event from the second year of life in which the boy in his crib witnessed his parents in intercourse on a hot afternoon. Later analysts, particularly Jacob Arlow (1980), have emphasized that the experience of the primal scene may evoke a sense of exclusion in the child and a wish to intrude into the action.
The experience of the primal scene is evoked by what may be the most poignant scene in the film. Cliff is at Ben’s daughter’s wedding. He and his wife are close to a separation. Suddenly, we see him look at something with shock and distress. We can easily guess at what he sees. Lester and Halley have walked in together. They are engaged to be married. Lester met her by chance in London and sent roses every day until he won his way to her.
What is most striking is that we can anticipate what Cliff sees before it is shown to us. It is not merely that Cliff loses out to the more powerful man. We suddenly feel that the loss was inevitable, that despite his fantasies of victory, Cliff sensed from the beginning that he was destined to lose. Throughout his pursuit of Halley he continually attempts to reassure himself that she will not fall in love with Lester by asking her to join in making fun of his rival. He is very disturbed when his wife suggests that Halley is falling in love with Lester. Cliff calls Halley’s hotel room to try to reassure himself that she is not with Lester.
Ultimately, Cliff is small and weak compared to Lester. He cannot win. His wife is infatuated with her brother. Now Cliff has lost again. His competition with Lester is like the futile competition of the small boy with his father for his mother’s love. The boy entertains fantasies of besting his father, but ultimately succumbs to overwhelming reality.
Dolores fills the same role. She is like an Oedipal intruder who wants to go beyond her role as Daddy’s little girl by pushing Mommy aside to take her place. Her fate is much harsher than Cliff’s. He is humiliated. She is killed. That is the difference between drama and comedy. One of Lester’s pet “clever” expressions is “If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny.” The Cliff/Lester plot bends, the Judah/Dolores plot breaks.
It is as if Dolores’ fate dramatizes Cliff’s worst fears. This is what happens if you challenge paternal authority too directly. Cliff is not a real danger to Lester. He sneaks around with Halley, he snipes at Lester with sideways looks and mumbled sarcasms, but he never threatens him in a genuine way. His greatest direct attack comes with the film he makes about Lester. He includes footage of Lester chasing after women and then compares Lester with a bombastic Mussolini. Even with this obvious criticism, there is a subtle deference to Lester’s sexuality and authority. Despite his seeming role as a maverick and an iconoclast, Cliff never really challenges Lester or the family structure.
This is the defense of the weaker child, secretly competing with a powerful parent. It is also the defense of an adult who fears the consequences of direct Oedipal battle. He attacks, fantasizes, displays some muted ambition, but always stays in the role of a child. His lack of success is his reassurance that he will not be taken so seriously as to take on the full wrath of his competitor or be forced to act on his own aggression.
Every film can be thought of as its own universe, with its own structure and rules. In the world of Crimes and Misdemeanors, powerful fathers rule. Those that threaten them will have to engage in mortal combat. The weaker characters can accept their secondary role, living off the beneficence of the powerful men or they can challenge in an ineffectual way. Even Cliff’s ideal, Professor Levy, inexplicably kills himself, leaving a note saying, “I’m going out the window.” Ben, the rabbi, appears to maintain his integrity, but he never challenges the authority of the paternal figures. He accepts his brother Lester’s help and gives saccharine advice to Judah. When Judah lies and tells him that Dolores decided to give up her pursuit of him, Ben accepts it, saying, “You got lucky.” At the end of the film, he is literally and figuratively blind as, we are led to believe, is his God. He achieves a spurious victory over evil by ignoring it. Judah tells him that he does not live in the real world, but in “the kingdom of heaven.”
Judah and Lester emerge strong and in possession of their hearts’ desires. They are each able to overcome any guilt or shame they may feel, utilizing the admiration of close friends and relatives to sustain their narcissism. The ruthless, ambitious people of the film, Judah and Lester, represent Oedipal fathers asserting a prerogative based on their superior size and power. The victims, Cliff and Dolores, are like helpless children, unable to succeed in a context in which might makes right. The injustice depicted in Crimes and Misdemeanors reflects a particular child-oriented view of this Oedipal mismatch.
But in their defeat, the “children” in this film also accomplish a victory over their fathers. It is a moral victory. Cliff is like a patient described in the psychoanalytic literature (Kafka, 1990) who maintained a stance of altruism and high moral standards for defensive purposes. Like Cliff, the patient often engaged in self-defeating behavior in the name of his morality. The analysis revealed that this patient was using his seeming strength of moral superiority to hide from himself his feeling of weakness and humiliation in relation to his father. His self-defeating behavior helped him suppress dangerous competitive wishes. He could achieve a moral victory without having to engage in life threatening competition.
The film establishes Cliff in a position of moral superiority over Lester and Judah. Cliff sees himself as a more thoughtful, intellectual man who produces serious documentaries as opposed to the shallow trash Lester produces. He depicts Lester as a narcissistic, power hungry womanizer, likening him to Mussolini. He makes his play for Halley on the basis of shared intellectual and esthetic interests. When she ultimately chooses Lester, Cliff feels she has “sold out”.
The film adopts the defense used by the analytic patient, equating morality with weakness and self-destructiveness. Although it does not hide Cliff’s hypocrisy, it nevertheless invites the viewer to share his judgment of the powerful figures, Judah and Lester. This is the basis of the moral dilemma that is created. The film projects all the ambition and murderous competitiveness onto Lester and Judah and all the moral superiority onto the weaker Cliff and Ben. The subliminal message is clear: that fathers are powerful and ruthless and children are weak and morally superior. We, the viewers, are left feeling confused. Judah and Lester are repugnant. We can enjoy the feeling of moral superiority, but this leaves us feeling that we cannot successfully compete. The filmmakers throw us into the dilemma of the vulnerable Oedipal child. We leave feeling that our choice is between either morality and blindness or immorality and ruthless effectiveness. Behind this dichotomy is a latent fable of a ruthless, powerful father and a weaker, innocent, morally superior son. I suspect that each viewer’s unconscious memory of Oedipal conflict is evoked by the images of the film to reinforce a sense of injustice and the failure of morality.
There are only two characters in the film who openly challenge paternal authority. One is Dolores, who is murdered for it. The other is Judah, who commits murder, then does battle with the father in his conscience. After the murder is committed by a hired hit man, Judah begins a wringing of hands. He argues with his brother about the terrible thing they have done in taking a human life. He is attempting to shift the blame to his conscienceless brother. He later even implies that it was the brother who disappointed his father’s high hopes. Despite his hand wringing, he goes to the site of the crime, not to weep, but to retrieve incriminating evidence. He expresses feelings of guilt and fears of being caught in Raskolnikov-like fashion. His opening words help explain what he is doing. If the eyes of God (and his father) are watching, then he must convince God of his sense of guilt and repentance.
As he struggles with what he has done, Judah begins a dialogue with his childhood image of his father. He goes back to the house in which he grew up and imagines himself intruding upon a family seder in which his father is debating morality with other family members. One “Leninist” atheistic aunt articulates the pragmatic realism that the film appears to teach: “Might makes right.” She says that six million Jews were killed and they got away with it.
Judah enters the debate asking, “And if a man commits a crime, if he kills?” His father says that he will be punished, and that even if he is not caught, “That which originates in a black deed will blossom in a foul manner.” Aunt Mae provides the model that the film will follow: “And I say if he can do it and get away with it, and he chooses not to be bothered by the ethics, then he’s home free. Remember, history is written by the winners, and if the Nazis had won, future generations would have understood the story of World War II quite differently.”
In fact, Judah will prove Aunt Mae’s words prophetic. Despite his guilt and fears, he is never caught or even suspected of complicity in the murder. He goes through a period of irritability and excessive drinking, but eventually overcomes it and goes on with his happy life. In the film’s penultimate scene, he talks with Cliff in a quiet corner of the wedding. He tells his story as a potential plot for a film, explaining that at the end, the murderer was able to return to his previous equilibrium, with an expectation of occasional pangs of guilt. Cliff cannot believe that anyone could live with the memory of such a crime. We, the viewers, are left with the contrast of the successful murderer, Judah, and the failed moralist, Cliff. In essence, Judah has wrestled with his conscience and won. In the process, he has overcome his father, proven him wrong and freed himself from the constraints of his father’s law. He proves that the eyes of God (and his father) are not watching.
By successfully abandoning his father’s moral precepts, Judah achieves an Oedipal victory, freeing himself from his father’s domination. We are left with the impression that Oedipal victories can only be won by adopting the ruthless tactics of the parent, the use of might to make right. On the surface, the film is about morality, putting us into a world in which ruthlessness leads to success. Beneath that surface, the struggle is between fathers and children. The fathers can be ruthless and the children can overcome them only by being equally ruthless. If they cannot do that then they must find a way to survive.
The life and death struggle between father and son appears in the words of the film’s philosopher, Professor Levy, who tells of a male God that demands obedience and orders a man to kill his son: “The unique thing that happened to the early Israelites was that they conceived a God that cares. He cares but at the same time he also demands that you behave morally. But here comes the paradox. What is one of the first things that that God asks? That God asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son, his beloved son, to him. In other words, in a millennia of effort we have not succeeded to create a really and entirely loving image of God. This was beyond our capacity to imagine.” In essence, Professor Levy is telling us that the morality we know is the morality of authority, of the father, and that the son is a helpless potential victim who at best is saved in an act of paternal restraint and beneficence.
Professor Levy also directs our attention to the effects of early childhood on later life. He says that we keep seeking the love objects of our childhood, while trying to improve upon the relationship this time around. “When we fall in love we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attracted as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us so that love contains in it the contradiction: the attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.”
We might add a compromise between the two that is exemplified in this film: the attempt to reconstruct the past to gratify our needs. Crimes and Misdemeanors gives us all the chance to subliminally re-imagine our past so that we, and not our powerful fathers, are the bearers of morality.
Kafka, E. (1990). The uses of moral ideas in the mastery of trauma and in adaptation, and the concept of superego severity. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 59:249-269.
Steinfels, P., Nuechterlein, J., Borowitz, B., and Erler, M. (1989). Woody Allen counts the wages of sin.
Previously published in the PANY Bulletin and in Double Feature: Discovering our Hidden Fantasies in Film by Herbert H. Stein, M.D. (2002:EREADS)