Intellectual Allen (i.e. Reverential Allen)
Week 1

Reading: Woody Allen's The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose. “The Whore of Mensa” pg. 141 – 153.
Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944)
Walter Benjamin's “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)
Harold Rosenberg's “The American Action Painters” (1952)
Clement Greenberg's “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939)

Wrote an assignment that analyzed a non-Woody Allen film using only the texts discussed in class.
I chose to use the perspective of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint to analyze the comedy The 40 Year Old Virgin, which was directed by Judd Apatow and starring Steve Carrell.

Portnoy vs. The Virgin
As Alexander Portnoy reveals to us through Philip Roth's text about how complicated and difficult sexual conquests can be, I am reminded of the character Andy Stitzer, played by Steve Carell, from “The 40-Year Old Virgin”, which came out in 2005 and was directed by Judd Apatow. Stitzer has been frustrated throughout his whole lifetime pretty much trying to steer clear of women and their sexual orifices due to how awkward he is with women and the terrible luck that he has had in attempts at getting them to have sexual relations with him; these constant failures that Andy encounters eventually make him stop any sort of attempts at sexual conquest and cause him to be a recluse, staying inside his home and keeping to himself for the most part, except when he has to talk to people at work, or go out to the store to get the ingredients to make a good egg-salad sandwich. The incessant amount of masturbation which Alexander Portnoy employs on a regular basis as an adolescent Jewish boy is akin to the various memorabilia that Andy Stitzer has collected and has displayed around his apartment with pride. Instead of taking out all of the frustration in his life out on his penis, as Portnoy does, Stitzer instead represses all of the feelings which make him upset and gets out any of his pent up aggression probably through painting die-cast figurines.
What intrigues me the most between the two characters of Portnoy and Stitzer is the huge contrast that they each display in masturbation techniques, along with how comfortable (or uncomfortable) each one is with masturbation and how each one feels about the act. Portnoy is no stranger to masturbation, they are much more than acquaintances, more like BFF's, for lack of a better term. Portnoy loves masturbation so much that he doesn't care when, where, or who may be around, as long as he is able to get his rocks off with no one being any the wiser, he is essentially happy. Not only does Portnoy use his hand though, he has a plethora of different ways to masturbate, which include a milk bottle, a cored apple, and even various pieces of a butchered cow, which most people would just use for ingestion. When Portnoy masturbates he is constantly fantasizing that he is being called “big boy” by these sexual objects and begging for him to do all the sort of dirty things that he would do to a real-life person, or maybe even a my-size Barbi doll, either way, it is obvious that Portnoy is well versed in the art of self-pleasure. Andy Stitzer approaches masturbation much like he approaches women, and that is to say that he tends to stay completely away from it; he has been so repressed from sexual frustration that even bringing himself to masturbate would be too much, even with an erection lasting longer than four hours. The one time that Stitzer does actually try his hand at masturbation, he treats it like he would try to romantically treat a woman; he unmakes his bed as sensually as he can, sets out all of the required accoutrement for masturbation, including hand lotion and kleenex napkins, sets up candles for some nice atmosphere lighting, and even turns the pictures around of his favorite stars. The imaginative part of masturbation is where Stitzer has trouble, because while he attempts to get the sexy women in his head to say attractive things, he is stopped by his own knowledge that he really isn't pleasuring a woman, but pleasuring himself, which is a thought that Andy can simply not stand; and so, Andy doesn't masturbate ever.

Oedipal Allen
Week 2

Reading: Sigmund Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, “The Relation of Jokes to Dreams and to the Unconscious.” pg. 197 – 223.

In this chapter of Freud's book, “The relation of jokes to dreams and to the unconscious is discussed. Thought transformation with a view to the possibility of representation, condensation and displacement are the 3 major achievements that may be ascribed to the dream work. The characteristics and effects of jokes are linked with certain forms of expression or technical methods, among which the most striking are condensation, displacement, and indirect representation. Processes, however, which lead to the same results have become known to us as peculiarities of the dream work. Jokes are formed as a preconscious thought is given over for a moment to unconscious revision and the outcome of this is at once grasped by conscious perception. The characteristics of jokes which can be referred to their formation in the unconscious are presented: 1) the peculiar brevity of jokes; 2) displacements; 3) representation by the opposite; and 4) the use of nonsense. Dreams serve predominantly for the avoidance of unpleasure, jokes for the attainment of pleasure; but all our mental activities converge in these 2 aims.” - Carrie Lee Rothgeb, Editor, “Abstracts of the Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. The New York Freudian Society.

We read, in class, an excerpt from Sander M. Gilman's Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews In this excerpt, we were given information revealing how many Jews dislike themselves because of their culture; how they were brought up, what their history is, etc. This point is really driven home in the rest of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, which we finished discussing this week. The first part of the book explains what the title of the book means.

“Portnoy's Complaint. A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism, and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's “morality,” however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship. “

Here is even more evidence that we can successfully attempt to psychoanalyze Woody Allen through his jokes, and through his works. Even though Allen did not explicitly state a lot of the things that we are inferring, there is enough evidence so that we can really get a good sense of how Allen was raised and how it affected the way he sees the world, and therefore, the way that he makes movies. Allen interprets the world and puts it on film, wrapped in the comedic hue that always surrounds anything in Allen's eyes (or at least it seems to!).

Continuing from the first day of the week on the Jewish self-concept, we received an essay to read by the University of Oregon's Martha A. Ravits called “The Jewish Mother: Comedy and Controversy in American Popular Culture.” This essay by Ravits, which was released in the scholarly journal MELUS in the Spring of 2000 goes into the negative light that American society has shone onto the stereotypical Jewish female. Ravits condemns things like Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint because of how harshly they criticize the women that put their heart and soul into raising them. Both Philip Roth and Woody Allen are prodigal and successful Jewish sons that now, in adulthood, choose to deject the women and mothers in society by imposing unfair critiques and stereotypes on them. This less-than-kind way that mothers of Jewish children are shown ties in directly with the excerpt from Sander M. Gilman's Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews; if there wasn't such a negative image that was being portrayed to the American people and society, then maybe the Jewish women would have a higher self-esteem, and this would cause everyone in the Jewish community to have better self-esteems and thoughts on self-worth.

There was a group presentation today on Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, but it was executed poorly, it wasn't very well put together, it wasn't very captivating, and due to all of these things, I don't remember anything else about it.