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film’s alteration of direction from atomization toward union and resolution. Geist, “The Rolling Stone Interview: Woody Allen,” p. 214.
    24. Allen wasn’t referring specifically to Hannah and Her Sisters when he told Bjorkman that filmmakers “create a world that [they] would like to live in. You like the people you create. You like what they wear, where they live, and it gives you a chance for some months to live in that world. And those people move to beautiful music, and you’re in that world” (p. 51). Nonetheless, this description evokes few scenes of his as compellingly as Hannah’s first Thanksgiving—until, that is, he began shooting the still more idealized world of Everyone Says I Love You .
    25. Whereas Hannah’s professional life is presented as unexceptionally successful, her career apparently encountering no conflicts between the institutions of the theater and her desire to express herself artistically on the stage, Mickey’s show’s ratings are down, its reviews are “terrible,” the sponsor is consequently hostile, and the writers are bitter about Standards and Practices’ suppression of their sketches, the resultant tensions prompting him (like Manhattan’s Isaac Davis) to repudiate television and quit his job.
    26. Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York: Viking Press, 1964), pp. 92–93.
    27. Evidence that Allen has some such cultural polarization in mind in scripting the television production scene, aligning Mickey and the show with Jewish cultural concerns, is provided by the fact that the evening’s show includes a skit in which Christianity’s most celebrated symbol, the Pope, is characterized as a child molester. Another sketch deals with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and when things get too much for him, Mickey looks to the ceiling and invokes the classic Old Testament formulation of divine injustice, echoing Job’s question of “Why me, Lord?” (pp. 30–31). That his assistant is portrayed by Julie Kavner, who would, in Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks” segment of New York Stories, play the first Jewish character with whom an Allen protagonist becomes romantically involved since Carol Kane and Janet Margolin portrayed Alvy Singer’s first two wives in Annie Hall, arguably reinforces the elements of Jewish American culture pervading this scene in Hannah .
    28. Pauline Kael was the most committed of Allen’s critics to finding the WASP/Jewish antinomy at the center of his work. In her review of Another Woman, she argued, “You can see in his comedies that he associates messy emotions with Jewishness and foolishness and laughter, but he wants to escape all that and be a serious’ dignified artist, so he sets his dramas in an austere Gentile world. And then what is the protagonist’s tight-nostrilled anguish about? Being repressed. Being a perfectionist. Not being emotional enough. That was the interior-decorator mother’s soul-sickness in Interiors, and it’s Marion’s soul-sickness here. Woody Allen is caught in his own Catch-22: his protagonist’s problem is not being Jewish.” Movie Love (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1991), p. 15. Kael’s assumption that Woody Allen couldn’t recognize this cultural tension in himself as thoroughly as she did and use it as the dramatic basis for film narratives is this chapter’s primary argument with Kael’s position.
    29. Elliot’s final comment on the affair, “Everything that happened between us seems more and more hazy” (p. 176), might be read as Allen’s attempt to minimize its future affect on Elliot and Hannah’s marriage by suggesting the relationship is coming to seem to him like a dream.
    30. Bjorkman, p. 55. Elsewhere, Allen called “the romanticized view of Mia” in Hannah and Her Sisters “the hardest thing we’ve done. There was so much ambivalence to the character, her goodness, her too-goodness, her niceness to her sisters but her feeling superior to them. In order to be successful, the character had to move in