A Comparison of Woody Allen and Amy Hempel's Exploration of the Self

NOTE: This article compares Woody Allen's 1983 mockumentary, Zelig, and author Amy Hempel's short story "The Harvest" (was originally published in The Quarterly, and then in Amy Hempel's short story collection, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom.) When the following article cites a quote or idea in "The Harvest" the parenthetical citation is (author, page number).

Introduction.

Woody Allen's mockumentary Zelig and Amy Hempel's short story "The Harvest" both introduce main characters that are going through an identity crisis. Zelig reports on "the human chameleon", a man who is famous for being Nobody. The Harvest's narrator is a lonely hospitalized woman struggling for a handle on her life. Both characters feel betrayed and stranded, unable to assimilate. Zelig compensates by over assimilating, shedding his identity and donning those identities of the people around him at any given moment. The Harvest's narrator is surrounded by people she does not want to be.

Self-Loathing

At the core of both characters' identity loss is self loathing. Zelig was bullied as a young Jewish boy by anti-Semites and his parents - distant and prone to shutting him in the closet as punishment - sided with the anti-Semites. Later - rejected by society - Zelig adopts the identity of a Nazi. His parents quarrel often and his sister becomes an alcoholic and shoplifter; his brother has a mental breakdown. Morris Zelig's deathbed confession to his son is that "life is meaningless nightmare of suffering" (Allen). In adulthood, Zelig copes with his independence by adopting the identity of his audience. He does not mask his identity; he erases it: "Suspicious, the detectives try to pull off his disguise, but it is not a disguise" (Allen). The Harvest's narrator suffers self-loathing in the aftermath of an automobile accident which severely injures her leg. In the hospital she is a cynic, suffocated by the irony that surrounds her. She feels betrayed and used by the man that was with her in the accident. He tells her that looks aren't important - at first. Then he goes back to his wife (Hempel 104). Her lawyer tells her that the truth is "immaterial" (Hempel 104). It doesn't matter that she never wanted to be a flight attendant. What matters is that now she can't (Hempel 104). The narrator secludes herself. She watches trash TV rather than talk to the man who only speaks in numbers, to hear his story or her nurse's story (Hempel 105). Instead of identity hopping like Zelig, the narrator associates her identity with the near loss of her leg, which needed four hundred stitches. When she finds out that she and her leg would be fine, the narrator realizes that she still feels disassembled, "I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life" (Hempel 106). The narrator hasn't accepted the changes in her life. She is still hanging on to a moldy identity. Her struggle is with remolding her identity, where Zelig must first find his identity.

Finding True Identity

The narrator in "The Harvest" reasserts her independence by going to the beach alone ("I went...myself. I drove the car") and wearing shorts, revealing her scars (Hempel 106). When a boy approaches her and asks her if her wounds are from a shark she agrees, a slip in identity. However, she turns this slip to her advantage, reasserting herself with a reply that despite the bite she is returning to the water, "And I'm going back in" (Hempel 106). Zelig does not find his identity alone. His public affliction attracts Dr. Fletcher. She calls his indefinite personalities a mixture of doubletalk that he learned from reading and observation (Allen). Convinced that Zelig's personality was simply suppressed rather than eradicated, she attempts to coax it out of him by allowing him to live in a non judgmental atmosphere. She secludes him from the public for months. Without the world's opinions vying for his time, Zelig exhibits his own identity. Under the care - or rather scrutinization - of a team of doctors Zelig was not cured. Fletcher had to remove him from their haphazard probing of his mind and body (Allen). Similarly, the narrator recovers by deflecting the world's judgment. She refuses to care which she shows by wearing shorts and flaunting her return to the waters, to the world (Hempel 106). She goes public to christen her identity whereas Zelig returned to the personal to find his identity.

Zelig reaffirmed by public; Hempel reaffirmed by Truth

When Zelig returns to the public eye his life as the human chameleon lashes back at him. Women claim that he fathered their children. Scandals ensue. Zelig removed a man's appendix and helped with the birth of a baby by using ice tongs while claiming to be a doctor, painted a house a terrible color while claiming to be a painter (Allen). Zelig can't take the public scrutiny and he returns to his chameleon ways. His self-loathing is so much that he goes to Germany and adopts the identity of a Nazi, his persecutor (Allen). Zelig's life is once again a public spectacle. The Harvest's narrator flips the story upside down and empties its contents when she reveals that many facts - such as that the man she was with was married - were exaggerations, understatements, or outright lies. She makes these falsehoods public by reporting them within the story itself. The narrator reveals that although the man as not married, he later married a fashion model. The mountain on which she crashed was the same mountain she saw every day from her hospital window for six months. The truth is sometimes unbelievable and therefore "I leave a lot out when I tell the truth" (Hempel 106). By adding this self-analysis, Hempel lays herself out for the public eye. She admits that the truth is malleable. This is the point at which Hempel solidifies her identity. Zelig on the other hand only discovers his true identity out of the public eye.

A Look at the overall works: "The Harvest" and Zelig.

As works themselves "The Harvest" and Zelig were also stories of the public and private shifting identity. "The Harvest", purporting to be nonfiction, reveals itself to be fiction by the end. The story itself shifts identities. It is both a story about a young woman that struggles with truth and identity and about a writer that loosely applies truth. Zelig is a mockumentary, fiction, reporting on nonfiction, loosely applying the truth. The movie is very public though it deals with the private theme of misapplied identity. The movie's "experts" even remark that Zelig, once a famous defining figure of the 1920s, has almost been completely forgotten (Allen). While Zelig is a wholly fictionalized character, he is the personification of the literal personality crisis that everyone experiences. Allen exemplifies this by inserting Zelig into history. "The Harvest" is not a universal story. Not everyone loses their identity to a car crash. However, the narrator's view that the truth is malleable is universal. Everybody stretches the truth to mold around their identity.

Identities are fragile. Protect them or don't survive.

Both Zelig and "The Harvest" are about survival. Zelig and Hempel's narrator search for a way to assimilate without giving up their identity. The mother of a boy on dialysis in "The Harvest" prays for drunk drivers. The narrator realizes that life is a reaction to everybody else, "Aren't we all...somebody's harvest?" (Hempel 105). In order to survival Zelig harvests the people around him for their identities. It is parasitic. The narrator was the man's harvest - he returns to his wife instead of her. Zelig was also harvested. The doctors clamored to diagnose Zelig to boost their own fame. Dr. Fletcher harvested Zelig, curing him and then marrying him. Both characters are figures who publicly and privately dealt with an identity that they had to redefine. The works themselves also took great pains to convince their audience before the fictionality is revealed. Ultimately, Allen and Hempel explore the conscious analysis of identity. Their works reveal that we are one big harvest. At times this is good as for the boy in "The Harvest" if he gets a liver. At times, bad: Zelig's was harvested by so many people he had no Zelig left for himself. An identity can go public - such as with celebrities - but it is easily molded, stolen, and broken. Be careful with it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hempel, Amy. "The Harvest." The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel. New York: Scribner, 1985.

Zelig. Dir. Woody Allen. DVD. MGM, 2001.