I normally hate the criticism that something “tries too hard.’
I hate “tries too hard” because it’s the world’s laziest criticism (tries too hard to do what, old chap?), because it seems to value timid, safe art, and because it veils all sorts of, let’s say, biases: it is what WASPs say to Jews and what preppies say to Midwesterners.
I also hate criticizing Woody Allen because his writing and his movies have given me so much joy.
But Woody Allen’s Mere Anarchy tries too damn hard.
1. About the vocabulary: “ . . . that night despite a welter of imprecations from the distaff side” Take the damn SATs already.
2. About the references: Within maybe a hundred words, “Cezanne,” “Renoir,” “the Available List at the William Morris Agency,” and an “actress whose co-op won’t let dogs in.” Artistic growth appears to mean being insecure in more than one milieu.
3. About the movies: Maybe it’s that because in a movie, the world naturally floods into whatever you’re doing, collaborators correct your defects, and story becomes more important. Maybe it’s because movies allow me pretend I live in these stylish worlds too. I said of the wonderful Match Point, “And the Oscar for best apartment in a supporting role goes to . . .” But I find mysekf cutting the movies more slack.
Sometimes you can only really see things when you hold them up next to something else. I read Mere Anarchy when I was also reading the McSweeney’s collection Created In Darkness By Troubled Americans, with bits such as “Circumstances Under Which I Would Have Sex With Some of My Fellow Jurors” and “Fire: The Next Sharp Stick.”
It isn’t that the McSweeney’s writers don’t drop names. Ezra Pound appears in the titles of not one, but two, pieces.
Maybe the difference is this: the need of the writer to be impressive doesn’t elbow aside the need of the writing to be funny.
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