Zelig: A Simulated Life

Abstract

Woody Allen is a true postmodern auteur, which is obvious from his constant experimentation with genres and mixing of techniques in both his fiction and films. Where in fiction, he surprises his readers by mocking scholarly criticism when he deeply analyzes something as banal as, for example, the laundry lists of Metterling (Allen, Getting 141–149), in his films, he also exploits a number of ways to tickle his viewers’ imagination by employing a plethora of established film genres the expectations of which, however, he subverts by disjunctive conjunction. His inter-and metatextual as well as inter-and metacinematic borrowings include references to literature, philosophy, and films to create his own mashup parodies and pastiches. Therefore, this chapter is grounded in an understanding of intertextuality and referentiality as it is proposed by Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon (The Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988, and The Politics of Postmodernism, 1989). Her notion of parody as both legitimizing and subverting its subject (see Politics 101) as well as her interpretation of historiographic metafiction as a tool to understand the past “through its contextualized remains” (Poetics 20) prove to be useful to access Woody Allen’s work. By analyzing the “formation of subjectivity, both the subjectivity of the spectator and that created by the spectator—the Star,” the postmodern insider-outsider doubled position in Zelig “questions the nature of the ‘real’ and its relation to the ‘reel’ through its parody and metacinematic play” (Politics 109).