In Zelig, Woody Allen examines the construction of identity by parodying the documentary or ‘truth’ genre. Allen’s meditations on what identity is are epitomized in the protagonist of the film, Leonard Zelig who is also, to a certain extent, autobiographical for Allen since Zelig, as a media image, may be a fictionized version of Allen’s own manufactured identity as Woody Allen. In other words, Zelig embodies Allen’s crisis – self, identity and art. Nonetheless, Allen also seeks to illustrate how mass media and popular culture can influence or even dictate the meaning of identity, and also how it is interpreted and imposed upon by agencies outside the individual.
The film complicates the notion of what identity is through Zelig, a paradox himself – being everybody, he is nobody; is himself when he has no self; and always recognizable despite being a cipher. During the White Room Sessions with the psychiatrist Eudora Fletcher, Zelig confides that, “I’m nobody. I’m nothing” and goes on to admit that he wants “to be like other people, so that I don’t stand out.” Having to bear the shame of never finished reading the great American novel Moby Dick, Zelig’s desire to conform stems from the need to be accepted and affirmed by others – this exemplifies how an individual’s identity is not self-defined but rather by external agencies which may be beyond one’s control, such as the collective opinion. Zelig’s ability to transform himself into any personality or character may earn him mass anonymity but it is precisely being devoid of individuality that makes Zelig individualistic. Yet this only reinforces the point that our identities are mere “made-up” entities, we are only “playing a part” to a greater whole and hence its actualization fictional. In a sense, the notion of identity is ultimately a social construct, roles we play in order to “fit in” – this is in accordance to societal and cultural norms since we “keep up” with appearances and fulfil the obligations and expectations to behave in certain ways. In other words, we are also who others think and make of us, and in the opening scene of the film, Susan Sontag, a Jewish art critic and author of Against Interpretation, ironically seems to impose a particular evaluation upon Zelig with the statement, “He was the phenomenon of the 20s.” Throughout the film, there are interspersions of scenes where other Jewish intellectuals, such as writer Saul Bellow, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, and literary critic Irving Howe, comment on Zelig – their various analytic input is, in effect, Allen attempting to convey that interpretation of identity is unavoidable. When an individual gives in to how his identity is interpreted, he allows himself to be dictated on who he ought to be. In the case of Zelig who is subjected to impositions of who he is by outside forces testifies to the power of mass media and popular culture to define and determine one’s identity.
The paradox of Zelig, thus, parallels that of an American individual’s quest for freedom and selfhood – that is, the irony of a person becoming an individual only when he immerses himself in mass media and popular culture by appropriating an identity which is not his to begin with. In the film, Zelig becomes an overnight “novelty” and “performing freak” – his instant celebrity leads to the media in naming Zelig the Chameleon Man. Naturally, exhibitions are held to educate the public about the wonders of Zelig’s metamorphic gifts, dance moves are choreographed to celebrate his reptilian marvels, while merchandise and soundtracks are produced and marketed to spread his fame. Even a Hollywood film is made based on the life of Zelig called The Changing Man. All of the above serve to exploit the individual’s quest for self-identification – one can be his own person by being a mass consumer of mass produced and mass marketed goods. When a man on the street is interviewed, he confesses, “I wish I could be Lenny Zelig”, which is not surprising for after all Zelig is, ironically, a quintessential symbol of individuality since he is able to evade any social, cultural, and ethnic categories through his metamorphosis – this illustrates how he embodies the American ideal of being an unique person. The mass media and popular culture influence and sometimes dictate who an individual ought to be, and in the case of Zelig it is evident of the mechanization of the technological age to manipulate desires and needs of the individual through conformity and cultural reproduction. That the masses so easily idolize and eagerly aspire to be Zelig only echoes the fact that no individual is a self grounded being, but one’s identity is subverted and domesticated by the dehumanizing powers of mass media and technology – in this case, the masses are enraptured with a media image of Zelig which is like a mirror they can project their desires for self-transformation onto. This collective psyche of the 1920s American imagination involves ideological socialisation of the masses into believing that one can be unique through an idealized mediocrity. The absence of an individual’s self, is in essence, a loss – this can be illustrated through Zelig’s chameleon-like metamorphosis where it represents how the medieval carnivalesque festivities and joy of exchanging costumes and status has ultimately become a curse in the 20th century. All individuals are outsiders in popular culture where mass media serves as a universal solvent in which we can dye ourselves any colours we want (that is, society endorsing a mix-and-match culture where we can adopt any identity we fancy) and capitalism reminds us that we are interchangeable digits, mere statistics – all of these reinforce the notion of dehumanization, which is synonymous with emptying ourselves of self-definition and self-determination. The film accentuates the consciousness of this sublime emptiness within each and every individual. It also, therefore, deconstructs the fantasy or myth of the fixity of selfhood – the only constant in identity is change and who an individual is, is subjected to the flux of popular culture.
This film takes on a deeper significance when we realise Zelig is a metaphor for Allen playing himself. Due to the nature of film as a form of documentation of Allen’s invented identity – a composite public image as an alter ego – he becomes a prisoner of his own cinematic image. The autobiographical element in Zelig is, nonetheless, manifested by how Allen invariably plays himself by thinly disguising himself as various characters in his other films and yet Allen is always distinctly recognizable, at least as fictionalized versions of his own manufactured identity as Woody Allen – an intellectual, neurotic schlemiel. However, Zelig resonates far more with Allen than the aforementioned. Like Zelig, Allen is also a Jew in America and this film speaks of Allen’s immigrant experiences and his obsession about the American Jewish identity. In their long history of persecution and oppression, many Jews had sought survival by taking on the qualities of whichever community that they found themselves in; in America, Jews have also, like Zelig, become chameleons in order to be accepted. Hence in their pursuit for material security and success, Jews have chosen ethnic assimilation as a solution and this film suggests Allen’s culpability in succumbing to American culture. This notion of the American Jewish guilt complex is further reinforced by a remark by Irving Howe, the author of The World of Our Fathers, “I mean, he wanted to assimilate like crazy” which is joined by other comments from the aforementioned Jewish intellectuals – this critical chorus of voices resonate with Allen’s illustration of the Jews’ ideological and cultural assimilation in America.
In one of the therapy sessions with Dr. Fletcher, she makes known her intention to hypnotize Zelig and in alleviating the latter’s anxiety and resistance, she reassures Zelig by saying, “It’s safe.” Zelig’s submission to such psychological “safety” is symbolic of Allen configuring his dependency on psychoanalysis to actual ‘transference’ – that is, Allen’s attempts to displace his political and emotional allegiance to his Jewish faith and roots by converting and conforming to the imperialistic culture of America. Dr. Fletcher’s experimental therapy sessions with Zelig also symbolise Allen’s belief that psychoanalysis can assuage his American Jewish guilt complex about being spared the Holocaust but even this is problematised when Zelig, who has apparently recovered, is visited by a panel of doctors and psychiatrists when suddenly he retaliates in violence against someone who innocently mentions that it is a beautiful day, simply because Zelig disagrees. The mysterious escape and disappearance of Zelig after he is overwhelmed with a myriad of lawsuits against him is not only an anecdote to the miserable failure of psychoanalysis to provide any absolute answers or final solutions to the Jewish survivor’s guilt, but it also, above all, makes the point that total conformity is the root of oppression and fascism. This is illustrated in the two Hitler scenes, the Berlin newsreel and the rally in Munich, where Zelig transforms himself into a Nazi lieutenant, which serve as Allen’s critique that an individual has lost all sense of selfhood in a commodified world, particularly in the 1920s where the cultural and commercial climate complements the advent of mechanized technology to dehumanize and rob a person’s identity. In other words, the mass media and popular culture are likened to the Nazi regime – oppressive and fascist – both able to ideologically threaten the notion of selfhood, leaving the individual helpless and, perhaps hopeless, against the manipulation, subversion and domestication of his wants and needs. This sums up what Allen himself claimed in an interview regarding this film about “the kind of personality that leads to fascism” – the hungry desire of an individual to “fit in”, and to receive societal acceptance and cultural affirmation, which parallels Allen’s ethnic guilt of assimilation in America.
Zelig, a figure of archival footage, invites an examination of how individual identity is formed in the context of construction of reality through technological manipulation of the film. Because there is a suspension of disbelief about staged realism or edited reality in Zelig, the validation of experience ought to be suspect and this requires especially meditation of the media image and portrait. This has implications for the construction of identity where Zelig’s chameleon-like metamorphosis serves as an autocritical demonstration of the artifice in staging the illusion of reality. Zelig, being a mock documentary, employs humour to subvert our complacent, unreflexive assumptions about filmed reality as reality, and further encourages us to critically engage with the notion of identity as an institution, which necessitates the transformation of identity from a private and personal entity into one which is public and communal. In other words, identity is a process that is external and performative. One of the themes in this film, self-transformation, as exemplified by Zelig’s capacity for metamorphosis, is studied in the light of psychoanalysis where change is synonymous with progress and improvement but Zelig’s is that of unreflexive, directionless conformity and thus Allen exposes the insidious subtext of the therapeutic elements of self-transformation. On the other hand, if taken more extremely, Allen also seeks to examine the promise of psychoanalysis in facilitating the discovery of purportedly one’s psyche, or soul, and eventually finds the hope of this voyage of self-discovery ringing hollow since there is no self to discover in the first place. At the end of the film, Zelig achieves psychic integration, and social and cultural assimilation, by marrying the Anglo-American Dr. Fletcher – this defuses his ethnic guilt and completes the “whitening”, hence reinforces that an individual’s identity is very much dependent on agencies outside himself, and negates the possibility of it being internal and actual.
In the final analysis, Allen seems to suggest that an individual’s identity can never be divorced from the collective, and therefore also undermining the existence of the individual since selfhood is very much a construct and product of the prevailing cultural and economic climate, in which the mechanization of media and technology is pertinent in the ideological socialization of the masses.
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