Today I rented and watched Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway. I'd already seen it at least three times before, but who can account for taste or moods? The movie's one of my favorites, and I felt like seeing it again. In fact, I have my own copy, but as a result of botched VCR programming the last three minutes are missing. I have only myself to blame for the poor copy job. Nevertheless, who would expect me to watch a movie whose last three minutes were missing? I tried that once -- before having learned of the copying blunder. I watched my tape to the very last scene: David Shayne (John Cusack) stands below Shelden Flender's (Rob Reiner) Greenwich Village apartment window, on the other side of which Flender sleeps with Shayne's neglected girlfriend, Ellen (Mary-Louise Parker). It is late. Shayne's play has opened that night in New York to great applause, but the work was not his, the success not his. Shayne arrives beneath the dark window certain of two things. He is not an artist, and he loves Ellen. He calls to Flender, to Ellen. Ellen comes down. She tells us and Flender she'll always love Shayne. She stands before him and he speaks. He has given up his pretension to the role of artist, recognizing the futility of this pursuit. He has already wasted too much time. Shayne asks her to return with him to Pittsburgh, to marry him. But before I get to hear Ellen's final words, the last words of the movie, my TV screen goes blue with white letters proclaiming "no signal." That's the end of my recording. I know how the movie ends. I shouldn't need the last words, but I do. That day I turned off the TV and VCR with a vague feeling of unease, a sense that one little piece was missing, that my emotional investment in Bullets Over Broadway had been misplaced, defrauded. And so today, when the mood and inclination to watch the movie came upon me, I had no choice but to go out and rent it. And I did. Gladly. Sure enough,it didn't go perfectly. About half-way through, the top 2 1\2 inches of the picture conspired against the lower 12 1\2, mangling and bending the top portion of the image till it was at right angles with the lower. I have no means of adjusting tracking. The distortion didn't bother me that much, though, and the tape made it all the way through. I was able to watch until the credits finished rolling and the music stopped, and I was happy.

My trouble with the VCR remote came later. Mine was not the commonly noted problem of a lost and hard to find remote, but a difficulty far more insidious in nature. I am certain that I'm not alone here. Perhaps difficulty is not the right word. My remote wasn't lost. I had it in my hand, and it worked. On tapes in the VCR, it functioned as it should. But I wanted it to work during situations in which I clearly had no right or reason to expect it to. Watching David Letterman after the movie, I missed a joke or a reference made by a guest (a British actress, whose name I missed, who played the role of a publishing house editor in Reality Bites who asks Winona Ryder for the definition of irony). I reached for the remote, intent on rewinding. Then caught myself. This occurred twice more before I stopped to think about what I was doing. During Bullets Over Broadway I had stopped the movie several times, rewound and paused, to catch things I missed when my attention wandered or to look at things more closely or to hear a line or scene I relished particularly or considered crucial. Several times I listened to David Shayne scream out his window "I'm a whore!" feeling his work compromised. Twice (for I had been distracted the first time by the booming base of the stereo from a car which idled outside my window, waiting for the light to turn, on the street below) I watched the scene with Helen Sinclair imploring David --"Don't speak! Don't speak!" -- while she put her hands to his mouth to prevent his professing love. At the end on hearing one of Ellen's final lines that I consider extremely important, I listened and then played it again just to be sure I heard it right: "I could love a man if he's not a real artist. But I couldn't love an artist if he's not a real man." This was complete control (minus tracking difficulties). In renting the video, I was sure that I wouldn't miss a thing. I was certain to get all that I wanted from the rented video. Fast-forward, rewind, pause. All with a button from the VCR remote. Later, I felt genuine if faint disappointment each time I reached for the remote with the intention of fast-forwarding commercials or rewinding Dave or pausing to wait out the car stereo which shook my windows.

***

In Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, life and art are in conflict. Early on, Flender presents to his cafe sidewalk entourage an essential question: Given a burning building and the opportunity to run into it and save only one of two things -- either the last known copy of Shakespeare's works or an anonymous human being, what do you save? There is no question, Flender asserts. Save Shakespeare! The greatest artist portrayed in the movie, the mobster Cheech (Chazz Palminteri), is this assertion's embodiment. Being in effect the true genius behind the play around which the movie circles, he will have no one sully and diminish the work. Cheech kills Olive (Jennifer Tilly), one of the play's actresses, who could be removed in no other way, rather than have his words, his play ruined. The price he pays for this, his art, is life. Olive was there by intractable arrangement, by decree of the show's producer, Cheech's boss, Olive's boyfriend, gangster Nick Valenti (Joe Viterelli). Cheech knew the risk involved in offing Olive, but accepted it; the true artist, or at least the great artist, Allen tells us, has no choice. For Cheech, art comes first. Dying by gunshot, blood flowing, he speaks his last words to David Shayne. They are not words of regret but instructions on how to end the play. His last thought is not for himself, but for his art -- which for Cheech is clearly more important than his life, than any life.

Inspiring Flender's words and Cheech's actions is the desire to make in and of art something greater than life in all its vicissitude and uncertainty, a will to transcend the significance of life and death. In art the Chimera of the Eternal glitters, the image of Immortality dances, and a facade of omnipotence is erected on the stage. Art offers the quixotic promise of control. Art is quixotic in its suggestion and offering for the very reason that it exists in the midst of life. Only by means of life does art exist at all, and life is epitomized ultimately by its powerlessness and lack of control. We walk a fraying line across the rift. We cannot preserve ourselves much less our creations. Light and air alone will claim every piece of paper, every canvas on which Leonardo set his hand. To save the last copy of the Works of Shakespeare from fire at the cost of life is to exercise a desperate futility that nullifies life. Shakespeare will burn, regardless. We are not gods. Copies will be blurred, VCR tapes shortened and distorted. We cannot forestall that which will occur, we cannot forestall the accidental, we cannot forestall the passage of time.

Thankfully, Allen offers a larger view of art. Particularly relevant are Ellen's words, already cited above. I will rewind, and repeat them. To David, she says: "I could love a man if he's not a real artist. But I couldn't love an artist if he's not a real man." The real man puts life before art, does not futilely deny life for the sake of art. But this is not a denial of art's significance. Ellen's statement allows for an art that affirms life, and in so affirming accepts its own mortality, its participation in life. She returns to David when he returns to her, when he respects life and offers his commitment in the form of a proposal. Her Joycean yes which ends the movie is a yes that recognizes infidelity, sin, inconstancy,and mutability; it is a yes that recognizes death; and it is a yes which embraces life, and affirms the simple virtue of living. Her yes recognizes the infirmity of life and art, but still she stands hopeful, above all nourishing a desire to live.

***

I recognize, the further one moves from art, the less control one can pretend to until existence is revealed as precarious indeed. Nevertheless, I naturally remain, irrationally, partially, quixotic to the end. My habitual use (or misuse) of the VCR remote control betrays the state my desire. If only I could bring that remote with me, out and onto the street where I can rewind, fast-forward and pause all that I see around me. No longer would I wait interminably in traffic snarls; no longer would I stumble in my speech at least as far as others saw -- I could go back and try again, and again; no longer would I suffer drawn out pain; no longer would a moment of pleasure last a mere moment, but indefinitely, at my command; no longer would an end in certain death confine me, I could go back and back forever.

Today I rented and watched Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway...

Douglas.S.Curran.27@nd.edu