Woody Allen’s films are all about people with mucked up interior lives. Allen’s characters are often over dependent on their shrinks, stuck in dissatisfying marriages, or haunted by oppressive childhoods. But the interior spaces in Allen’s films are no where near as messy as the characters that live in them. In fact, the smart, stylish interior design that frames the shots in Allen’s wry dramas starkly contrasts his characters’ psychological instability.

Carl Jung, the celebrated psychoanalyst who had a penchant for turning dreams into vivid maps of neuroses, thought that interior spaces, houses in particular, revealed the state of people’s mental interiors. Allen, who probably has as vivid an imaginary life asany Jung patient, uses dreams to achieve a completely different end. In Allen’s films, houses and interior spaces don’t reflect people’s neuroses. Instead, they shroud neuroses by surrounding characters with a deceptive sense of order.

In Allen’s 1977 comedy Annie Hall, the young Alvy Singer’s mother takes him to a doctor because he’s stopped doing his homework. Sitting on the shrink’s unadorned tan sofa that perfectly sets off the room’s sage green wallpaper, Alvy is flanked by his mother and a stylish floor lamp with a precisely placed porcelain dish on its built in brass table. Alvy explains, “The universe is expanding. Well, the universe is everything and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.” Alvy’s exasperated mother retorts, “What does the universe have to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn. It’s not expanding!” Forced to cope with a universe that he can do nothing about, Alvy Singer grows up to become obsessed with controlling his own space, a trajectory shared by a multitude of Allen characters.

There’s rarely a mess in a Woody Allen film. Sometimes, someone like Chris Wilton in Matchpoint may doze off at the computer with a few disorganized papers and a mostly empty wine glass cluttering the table around him. But usually, Allen’s characters keep their things in place, taking the pristine, pale toned, less-is-more approach to interior design.

The understated lighting and furnishings in Allen’s 1978 film Interiors sets the stage for the story’s driving action. The film chronicles the eccentric behavior of Eve, a depressed interior designer who manages her mental illness by arranging rooms her ex husband describes as “ice palaces.” Eve’s design combines the elegance of early twentieth century furniture and the austerity of modern design. It’s as if a pared-down Charles Rennie Macintosh approach to the Arts and Craft Movement merged with a colorless Florence Knoll approach to modernism. Even when she decorates her daughter’s apartment, Eve uses the hip innovations of the mid 1900s—like shag rugs and Bauhaus inspired sofas—to invoke an icy mood.

Eve has a penchant for picking out the most expensive, most understated vases from high-end New York boutiques. When Eve’s ex-husband, Arthur, marries an outspoken woman who collects “real primitive statues with the big hips and the big breasts,” her carefully composed world breaks open. Pearl, the new wife, shatters one of Eve’s vases and everything else crumbles in response: Eve drowns herself and her daughters are forced to reclaim their lives without their mother’s pale tones to control them.

Mel Bourne, the production designer who received an Academy Award nomination for Interiors, also worked on six other Allen films, including Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories. These latter three films belong to Allen’s signature oeuvre of self-deprecating intellectual humor. They have lighter, wittier plots than Interiors, but interior design still masks the disordered lives of the characters. Bourne’s approach to the design of the spaces in Annie Hall is only slightly livelier than his approach to the spaces in Interiors.

When the self-obsessed Alvy rewinds through the scenes he’s shared with his ex-girlfriends, their bedrooms are only diverse in the sense that one looks like it could have popped out of Dwell Magazine and another looks like it slipped off the pages of House Beautiful. With the exception of Annie Hall’s scatter-brained abode, each apartment or house looks only half lived-in and even Annie’s place is ordered and controlled by the movie’s midpoint. Throughout the film, Alvy repeatedly breaks the fourth wall in order to give his viewers cynical accounts of what’s going on his head. These commentaries make the divide between the movie’s controlled settings and the character’s muddled interior thoughts especially clear. None of the slick spaces Alvy inhabits fix the fact that he finds his relationships with other people relentlessly confusing.

In his 2001 book, The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen, Peter Bailey observes “For all their preoccupation with art and the artist, Allen’s films are utterly lacking in conclusions affirming the redemption of high culture art.” Bailey’s comment perfectly applies to the role interior design plays in Allen’s work. All the egocentric artistic intellectuals that populate Allen’s storylines do their best to make their houses and apartments elegant reflections of high culture. But it’s these ordered interiors that spotlight the impossibility of maintaining control.

While interior design cannot keep anyone’s life from spinning out of control, it can certainly serve as a comforting façade. For a filmmaker as pessimistic about meaning in life as Allen, his films actually offer a believable alternative to redemption. Ordered, subtle design compensates for lack of resolution, a gimmick not too far removed from how design functions in the real world. If we can control our personal spaces, we can at least temporarily shield ourselves from threat of the expanding universe.

>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Film, Art & Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.