SOURCE: Dunne, Michael. “Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the Tradition of Metafiction.” Film Criticism 12, no. 1 (fall 1987): 19-27.

[In the following essay, Dunne finds parallels between John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and Woody Allen's film The Purple Rose of Cairo.]

Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) has the same relation to romantic film comedy as radical post-modern writing such as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1967) has to traditional prose fiction. The chief parallel stems from the fact that, faced with outmoded conventional forms, Allen—like Barth—ironically raises doubts about the effectiveness of his medium in order to achieve a new sort of aesthetic order. Robert Scholes has called fiction that challenges its own premises in this way “metafiction,” and we may follow Scholes in calling The Purple Rose a “metafilm.” Terminology is less important, however, than a recognition that Allen has succeeded in creating romantic film comedy under cultural circumstances that would seem to make such an achievement impossible.

A passage from the title story of Lost in the Funhouse should serve to illustrate the technique of this and other metafiction. In the first eight paragraphs of the story Barth satisfies many requirements of the traditional short story. He introduces Ambrose, a sensitive, insecure boy; his older brother Peter; Magda, the girl they both love; the boys' parents; and their Uncle Karl. He develops these characters somewhat, establishes his setting, and initiates his plot. Then the narrator says, or writes, the following in paragraph nine:

Plush upholstery prickles uncomfortably through gabardine slacks in the July sun. The function of the beginning of a story is to introduce the principal characters, establish their initial relationships, set the scene for the main action, expose the background of the situation if necessary, plant motifs and foreshadowings where appropriate, and initiate the first complication or whatever of the “rising action.” Actually, if one imagines a story called “The Funhouse” or “Lost in the Funhouse,” the details of the drive to Ocean City do not seem especially relevant. The beginning should recount the events between Ambrose's first sight of the funhouse early in the afternoon and his entering it with Magda and Peter in the evening. The middle would narrate all relevant events from the time he goes in to the time he loses his way; middles have a double and contradictory function of delaying the climax while at the same time preparing the reader for it and fetching him to it. Then the ending would tell what Ambrose does while he's lost, how he finally finds his way out, and what everybody makes of the experience. So far there's been no real dialogue, very little sensory detail, and nothing in the way of theme. And a long time has gone by already without anything happening; it makes a person wonder. We haven't even reached Ocean City yet; we will never get out of the funhouse.

(77)

The effect of such writing is, paradoxically, to italicize all the elements—character, setting, action—that Barth's narrator seems to discount. Moreover, the “reader” considered in Barth's discussion is co-opted as a result of this technique into participating in the narrative process. By deliberately treating conventions as conventions, Barth draws the reader into the role of accomplice and foists upon him responsibility for the sorts of traditional expectations that the narrative voice ridicules as futile, most especially the expectation of coherent closure. In fact, John O. Stark argues, in his study The Literature of Exhaustion, that post-modern fiction is distinctly marked by its resistance not merely to happy endings, but to closure of any sort (8ff.).

“Lost in the Funhouse” is exemplary of this tendency also, particularly in a passage occurring about two-thirds of the way through. Since the previously quoted passage, Barth has developed his characters further and has brought his fictional Ocean City into sharper focus. He has even advanced the plot a bit. As a result, by the time the illustrative passage occurs, Barth has finally succeeded in fulfilling his title by getting Ambrose lost in the funhouse. Then we read the following:

One possible ending would be to have Ambrose come across another lost person in the dark. They'd match their wits together against the funhouse, struggle like Ulysses past obstacle after obstacle, help and encourage each other. Or a girl. By the time they found the exit they'd be closest friends, sweethearts if it were a girl; they'd know each other's inmost souls, be bound together by the cement of shared adventure; then they'd emerge into the light and it would turn out that his friend was a Negro. A blind girl. President Roosevelt's son. Ambrose's archenemy.

(87)

In this passage Barth is simultaneously playing with his reader and striving to fulfill a fictional design. This bifurcation is necessary because, after so many centuries of Aristotelian plotting, Barth obviously feels that it would be aesthetically invalid, and perhaps dishonest, to resolve his story neatly with a traditional conclusion. On the other hand, Barth will not accept simply dribbling off into inconclusive insignificance. Here is where the reader's participation becomes crucial. Having read so many stories already, the reader has natural—conventional—expectations about what should eventuate from Ambrose's predicament. Barth deliberately raises expectations of this sort through suggestions such as those in the quoted passage. Then he turns to what Roland Barthes has defined as “ludic” writing to successively reject all these possibilities. This device does not invalidate the expectation of closure, however. The reader has still been allowed, even encouraged, to entertain his desire for a happy ending, even if only momentarily. Finally, while participating in this process, the reader may justifiably infer an air of aesthetic desperation about the whole enterprise.

Scholes has attributed the origins of such writing by Barth and other “fabulators” such as Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover to the fact that these writers must approach their craft burdened by the legacy of centuries of fiction that seems to have exploited the possibilities of their medium to the point of bankruptcy. Scholes writes:

The history of the form he works in lies between every writer and the pure ideas of fiction. It is his legacy, his opportunity, and his problem. The fiction of forms at one level simply accepts the legacy and repeats the form bequeathed it, satisfying an audience that wants this familiarity. But the movement of time carries such derivative forms further and further from the ideas of fiction until they atrophy and decay.

(108)

This last state is the condition Barth writes about in his landmark essay of 1967, “The Literature of Exhaustion.” There, Barth agrees that, under the circumstances Scholes describes, the serious writer must resort to some strategy of exigency. That is, he must actually do with his left hand what his right hand demonstrates to be impossible or futile. Furthermore, as we have seen, the writer of metafiction requires the active complicity of the reader if he is to succeed in all this sleight-of-hand.

The resemblance to the fabulators of Allen's artistic dilemma is clear first of all in his 1980 film Stardust Memories, in which a short, balding, bespectacled film-maker named Sandy Bates questions, in a comic film, whether comic films are worth creating. The autobiographical parallels to Allen's own situation during the stage of his career marked by Annie Hall (1977), Interiors (1978), and Manhattan (1979) are apparent, and thus many of Sandy's experiences may be seen as cinematic displacements of Woody Allen's own. Most obvious among these is the delicate balance required of a film-maker caught between his audience's demand that he continue in his early mode of antic comedy and his own feeling that there is more to art and life than easy laughs. All through Stardust Memories, for example, fans and studio functionaries ask Sandy when he will return to his early comic manner, just as customers and critics alike asked in the late 1970s when Allen would produce another Bananas or Take the Money and Run. Such thinking about film or fiction characterizes “an audience that wants … familiarity,” as Scholes says in the passage quoted above. The other side of the conflict is articulated by Sandy late in the film when he asks a luminous visitor from another planet, “Should I stop making movies and do something that counts, like helping blind people, or becoming a missionary, or something?” In other words, is there any aesthetic ground between repetition and silence?

In Stardust Memories this question is dramatized in numerous imitation of Ingmar Bergman that opens with an obviously symbolic train ride, perhaps heading toward hell. The studio crowd, led by spokesperson Laraine Newman, wants this film to have an upbeat ending in which all these damned souls get translated to Dixieland-jazz heaven. After all, the movie is slated to open over the Easter weekend! Sandy, on the contrary, wants to end the film in a garbage dump. Clearly, an impasse blocks the conclusion both of Sandy's unnamed film and of Allen's Stardust Memories. Sandy ultimately solves his aesthetic dilemma by inventing another train ride in which he finds happiness with his lover Isabel (Marie-Christine Barrault). When Isabel objects to this ending as sentimental, Sandy explains that it is “the good kind of sentimental,” thereby convincing himself and perhaps his lover.

Allen is less easily satisfied. Although he seems willing to concede the wit involved in Sandy's ad-hoc assertion of filmic completeness, he seems unwilling to accept mere technical virtuosity as authentic aesthetic experience. This is unsurprising in light of the fact that Allen has Sandy ironically riducule the illusion of artistic closure earlier in the film. “Only art can give you control,” Sandy says, “only art and masturbation, two areas in which I am an absolute expert.” Given this equivalence of completed artistic form and masturbation, it seems unlikely that any conventional ending, even an admittedly “sentimental” one, will win Allen's approval. In fact, his frustrated search for a suitable ending for Stardust Memories is apparent throughout the latter part of the film, a testimony to the difficulty of producing romantic film comedy in our time.

An astounding series of potential endings begins when Sandy takes a realistic automobile ride with a neurotic lesbian violinist (Jessica Harper). Despite the problems sure to attend any romance between the two, they seem to be riding toward some sort of romantic resolution when the Rolls breaks down and they become lost in the country. Allen introduces them immediately into a series of surreal episodes involving U.F.O. freaks and Fellini-esque magic tricks, suggesting, at least momentarily, that some sort of symbolic resolution is coming. The film does not end here, however, because this scene evolves into Sandy's conversation with the extraterrestrial about the significance of comedy. Soon this apparently crucial scene is curtailed by flashbacks to an earlier romance and by further complications of Sandy's relations with the Jessica Harper and Marie-Christine Barrault characters. Perhaps some sort of romantic mixup will be sorted out, we think, to create an ending for the film. But, any romantic resolution is blocked when a crazed fan assassinates Sandy. Surely a conclusion is suggested here, we assume, especially since Sandy seems about to discover the meaning of life while on an operating table. Moreover, since this discovery takes place over Louis Armstrong's recording of “Stardust Memories,” the expectation that everything will finally draw to an appropriate close seems particularly warranted. The expectation must be abandoned when we discover that Sandy has not really been shot after all. He has merely fainted and soon emerges from the hospital to be farcically arrested by the police. Surely this cannot be the ending, we think, and we are right. On his almost immediate release from jail, Sandy catches up with an irate Isabel and conceives an appropriate conclusion for his film.

However, just as we have been presented this coherent, if contrived, resolution, the camera pulls back to reveal an audience watching the ending of Sandy's film. Perhaps the viewer is willing to accept this as an organically appropriate resolution for Allen's Stardust Memories since the central character is a film-maker. This is still not the ending, however. The members of this audience go on to comment, often negatively, about what they have seen. To the viewer's surprise, this audience turns out to include Marie-Christine Barrault, Jessica Harper, Charlotte Rampling, Tony Roberts, and all the other actors in Allen's film, not Sandy's. Furthermore, as they exit the female members of the cast compare notes on whether “he” kept his mouth open during the kissing scenes, and the viewer is left to decide whether “he” is Sandy or Woody or both. However he decides this question, the viewer is forced to recognize that he has been led to accept and then reject three, four, or more conclusions to Stardust Memories. When Woody or Sandy walks up the theater aisle alone in the film's last scene the movie is definitely over, but there is great ambiguity in the viewer's mind about how it has turned out. He might easily complain along with Barth's narrator, “We haven't even reached Ocean City yet; we will never get out of the funhouse.”

Despite his inability to resolve the issues raised in his film—perhaps because of this inability—Woody Allen has even so produced a metafilm of sorts in Stardust Memories. He has done this, moreover, by appropriating the artistic strategies used by writers of post-modern metafiction, most significantly their insistence to the reader that what they are producing is art, not life. In The Purple Rose of Cairo Allen continues to develop these strategies. Furthermore, he converts his audience's desire for coherent closure—a desire he provokes only to frustrate in his earlier film—into the method by which he achieves the very totality of aesthetic effect that his metafilm seems to ridicule.

The Purple Rose centers on Cecilia (Mia Farrow), a mousy, Depression-era hash-house waitress who is married to a coarse, womanizing, wife-beating sponger named Monk (Danny Aiello). Unsurprisingly under these circumstances, Cecilia seeks escape from reality in the formulaic romantic films offered weekly at her neighborhood theater, the Jewel. The contrast between such films and Cecilia's real life emerges clearly in the opening scene, which shows Cecilia dreamily contemplating a poster advertising this week's offering, an obviously escapist B-movie called The Purple Rose of Cairo. Her imaginative trance deepens as Fred Astaire sings on the sound-track, “Heaven, I'm in heaven …” Suddenly the fantasy is shattered as a letter falls to the pavement from the marquee overhead. Fred's voice fades. Back in real-life New Jersey Cecilia is urged by the theater manager not to miss this week's offering. “Cecilia, you're gonna like this one,” he says. “It's better than last week's, more romantic.” Immediately Allen cuts to a hard, angry woman sitting in a diner. “Miss, I wanted oatmeal before my scrambled eggs,” she says to a still dreamy-eyed Cecilia, who is now wearing her waitress's uniform. Here in the first few minutes of Allen's film, the audience is clearly warned that the movies are only movies, not real life. Barth could hardly make the point more explicitly.

If any doubt lingers, Monk repeatedly expresses the contrast for his wife and for Allen's audience. When Cecilia begs Monk to accompany her to the first night's showing of The Purple Rose, for example, he refuses, saying, “Cecilia, you like sitting through that junk. Me, I'm gonna shoot crap, O.K.?” Clearly, Monk rejects the premise that art—in this case, film—can transform and illuminate experience. Just as obviously, Cecilia has different expectations, and so she goes to the Jewel, alone, to share vicariously in the devil-may-care highlife of beautiful people such as playboy Larry Wild, the Countess, and “explorer-poet-adventurer” Tom Baxter, “of the Chicago Baxters.” Most of Allen's audience probably also rejects Monk's unimaginative criticism in order to enter this fantasy world with Cecilia. After all, if we are seeking Allen's Purple Rose in the first place, then we must not agree with Monk that all movies are “junk.”

And the fantasy is very appealing. Within his color film, Allen has created a brilliant replica of a 1930s black-and-white musical, down to the lighting, set design, and tuneful soundtrack. Fred and Ginger would feel right at home in these art deco surroundings, and so does Cecilia, and so do we. Our absorption into the black-and-white Purple Rose is so easy because Allen effectively cuts from color shots of Cecilia and the other patrons of the Jewel, to shots in which the theater in color frames a screen showing the black-and-white Purple Rose, to shots in which the black-and-white film fills our whole field of vision. We thus can watch exactly the same romantic comedy that Cecilia is watching at exactly the same moment she sees it for the first time. Allen's parody is so perfectly executed, moreover, that our experience of the black-and-white Purple Rose can draw on our previous experience of the genre. Surely we have seen Fred, Ginger and Edward Everett Horton in similar circumstances. Or was it Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler? And, what happened to all of them? They drank champagne, found romance, and lived happily ever after. Surely the same is in store for Tom Baxter, Copacabana chanteuse Kitty Hyanes, and, by extension, for our point-of-view character, Cecilia.

Such expectations are unrealistic, Allen feels. As he says in an interview with Caryn James, “The movies are just a narcotic for [Cecilia]. The reality of life was what was going on in the United States at that time and also in her personal life” (27). What was going on in the United States was the Depression that turned Monk into a bum and Cecilia into an ineffective and eventually unemployed waitress. What was going on in her personal life is epitomized when Cecilia comes home from her second viewing of The Purple Rose. She and we are transported directly from the black-and-white Copacabana to the apartment in dismal color in which her gross husband is flagrantly courting the sexual favors of an even grosser neighbor named Olga. This contrast between art and life so shocks Cecilia that she packs her bags to leave an obviously failed marriage. The audience can only applaud her decision. Against this applause, Monk again articulates the unimaginative, realistic attitude. As Cecilia leaves, he shouts after her, “See how far you get. Go on, go on! You won't last. You'll see how it is in the real world.” Alas, Monk is right. Cecilia has no money, no skills, no wealthy friends, no prospects, no hope. She soon returns to further abuse and humiliation.

As in the musicals of the 1930s, however, we need not despair. Romantic salvation seems possible for Cecilia when the pith-helmeted Tom Baxter steps off the screen of the Jewel to talk to her. In the process, he is transformed from black-and-white into a full-color inhabitant of Cecilia's world. He has watched her watching him through five showings of The Purple Rose, he says, and she has won his heart. His plan is to leave the film, take Cecilia away with him to Egypt, and live happily ever after. Obviously some difficulties clutter their path to romantic fulfillment, but the audience's experience of earlier films has preconditioned us to accept the possibility that these difficulties can be overcome. After all, if a millionaire and a struggling hoofer from the chorus can find true love, why not a waitress and a fictional character?

Surely desire triumphs over reason when we indulge such hopes. Allen makes this clear repeatedly in the film but perhaps most effectively during the scene in which Tom takes Cecilia to an expensive restaurant, confident that he can pay the bill with the stage money in his pocket. While they are dancing, Cecilia tells Tom about life in the real world: “People get old and sick and die and never find true love.” Tom expresses surprise at this news: “You know, where I come from, people they don't disappoint. They're consistent. They're always reliable.” Allen conceals a warning to the audience in Cecilia's reply: “You don't find that kind in real life.” Tom reassures her even so by saying, “You have.” Assuredly, a great deal of disbelief must be suspended to maintain our hopes for a happy ending to this affair. Yet the alternative of Cecilia's returning to her life with Monk is by this point cinematically unacceptable.

Just when the unlikelihood of the Tom-Cecilia affair begins to strain our credulity, however, Allen ingeniously quiets our anxiety by turning the romance into a triangle. Enter Gil Shepherd, the actor who played Tom Baxter in The Purple Rose. Both parts are played in Allen's film by Jeff Daniels, but Daniels succeeds in distinguishing his two roles sufficiently to suggest that Gil might be a real-life rival to the fictional Tom for Cecilia's love. In fact, the two suitors soon confront each other, arguing their relative merits before the girl they are both pursuing. Gil first asks Cecilia in surprise, “You want to waste your time with a fictional character?” Cecilia's answer echoes the audience's absurd hopes for a happy ending when she says, “But Tom's perfect.” In return, Gil seems to speak for Allen when deflating this unrealistic view: “What good is perfect if a man's not real?” Tom's only defense is to claim naively: “I can learn to be real.” Gil probably wins this romantic argument, and he certainly gets the last laugh, when he responds in annoyance: “You can't learn to be real. It's like learning to be a midget. It's not a thing you can learn.”

Tom is not discouraged, and so the romantic competition continues. Whichever of the two heroes wins Cecilia's hand, however, he will be a marked improvement over the repulsive Monk. Thus, the audience is encouraged to think that the happy ending conventional in the genre is still possible. If the viewer is rooting for the “real” man, Gil Shepherd, he will be delighted when Gil and Cecilia perform two peppy musical numbers together in a quaint little music shop operated by a twinkly piano-playing, gray-haired lady. When the two reenact a love scene that Cecilia has memorized from Gil's earlier film, Dancing Doughboys, this viewer will be even more encouraged at seeing how good these two young people look together, especially when they kiss. Perhaps some viewers will be disturbed when Gil explains away his on-screen kissing of Ina Beasley by saying, “We professionals, we can put that stuff on, just like that.” But Gil's partisans surely will distinguish his pretended passion for Ina from his real love for Cecilia. In this light, life with Gil in Hollywood seems distinctly possible for Cecilia, an ending both happy and appropriate.

If the viewer finds Gil too slickly packaged and prefers the wide-eyed boyishness of Tom Baxter, he may also have reason to hope. In one of the film's most imaginative segments, Tom takes Cecilia with him into the black-and-white world of the screen for the night of her life. Dozens of similar scenes echo through Allen's brilliant night-clubbing montage of the Harlequin Club, the Hot Box, the Club Harlem, and the Latin Quarter, each with appropriate music for dancing by Tom and Cecilia. This is life as we all might hope it to be. The champagne may be ginger ale, as one customer points out to Cecilia at the Copa. Sexual encounters may terminate in a fadeout, as Tom further explains. Nothing admittedly is perfect. On the other hand, Cecilia can dance merrily in the movies. Stage champagne is better than what she gets in New Jersey. A fadeout is probably preferable to actual sex with Monk. Ending up with Tom on the silver screen is an alternative happy ending equally consistent with the film's premises and the audience's desires.

As things turn out, after raising the prospect of two such satisfying resolutions, Allen denies the audience both. First, Cecilia sends Tom back onto the screen, and we learn that he will subsequently be destroyed along with all prints of his film. Having chosen Gil and Hollywood instead, Cecilia rushes home to pack and face another confrontation with Monk. Monk's parting taunts are ominous, however, an unsettling challenge to our hopes for a happy ending. “Go, go!” he shouts at Cecilia. “See what it is out there. It ain't the movies. It's real life. It's real life and you'll be back. Just mark my words.” Once again Monk is correct. Gil has run out on Cecilia after persuading her to reject Tom. Gil was only a professional actor pretending to love her after all.

Monk is, of course, the only man in Cecilia's future because, as he says, “It ain't the movies. It's real life.” As we all know, in real life, waitresses from New Jersey more often end up with men like Monk than with Gil Shepherds or Tom Baxters, even though romantic film comedies have traditionally ignored such harsh realities by allowing these women to live happily ever after, as they obviously deserve. Allen's genius in this film lies in bridging the chasm between realistic experience and cinematic romanticism. This is what makes The Purple Rose of Cairo a metafilm. In deference to the cynical objectivity demanded by contemporary audiences, Allen allows the Depression and Monk to triumph over the Copacabana and Tom Baxter. Along the way, however, he has created a dazzling black-and-white image of perfection to shine on the screen once more and appeal to the Cecilia lurking inside all experienced filmgoers. Consequently, after he has punctured all her illusions, Allen closes his film with Cecilia seated once more in the Jewel theater, her pathetic suitcase and ukelele on the seat beside her, as she stares in rapture at Fred and Ginger dancing on the screen. The soundtrack plays, “Heaven, I'm in heaven …” Cecilia begins to smile.

At first, the viewers probably smile along with Cecilia, relieved that she seems to be recovering from her romantic disappointment. Cecilia's peaceful absorption into Top Hat thus mirrors our desire to see The Purple Rose end happily. Since viewers of Woody Allen movies are more critically aware than Cecilia is, however, reservations soon surface. We remember that Cecilia must eventually leave the theater and return to Monk—a happy ending in no one's view. Even so, this somber reflection does not totally cancel the earlier positive impression. Unlike Stardust Memories, this film does not serially propose and reject such conclusions. Instead, it suspends the positive and negative, the real and the imaginary, in a purely cinematic form of ambiguity. Real life, we are aware, often demands either/or choices of us, but Allen has accorded such equivalent solidity to New Jersey and to the silver screen that we can balance the double vision of Cecilia imaginatively dancing with Fred Astaire and gloomily anticipating her return to Monk. These conclusions are therefore not discrete but simultaneous. In his interview with Caryn James, Allen says about this ending, “The ambiguity may be good luck, something that came from the healthy growth of that film” (27-28). Surely, “good luck” can have played a very small part in such a brilliantly conceived and crafted film. On the other hand, “healthy growth” of more than one kind is clearly apparent.

As he fades to black over the intimations of Cecilia's faint smile, Woody Allen affirms the vitality of his medium, romantic film comedy, even in the face of a plot that appears to repudiate it. Surely the almost-universal approval accorded his next films, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Radio Days (1987), testifies to the audience's desire for this affirmation. And yet, Allen's enabling act of imagination takes place first in The Purple Rose. By rejecting both the banal happy endings of conventional film comedy and the apparent inconclusiveness beclouding Stardust Memories, Allen succeeds in transcending the gap between desire and actuality, art and life, form and formlessness. In this respect also he comes to resemble the creators of post-modern fiction, especially their high priest. Robert Scholes has written, “The energizing power of Barth's universe is the tension between the imagination of man and the conditions of being which actually prevail” (119). The same may now be said of Woody Allen. We may thus describe Stardust Memories analogously as Allen's film of “exhaustion” and The Purple Rose of Cairo and its successors as his films of “replenishment.”

Works Cited

Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Friday Book: Essays and other Nonfiction. New York: Putnam's, 1984. 62-76.

———. Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968.

Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.

James Caryn. “Auteur! Auteur!” The New York Times Magazine 19 Jan. 1986: 18-30.

Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana: U. of Illinois P, 1979.

Stark, John O. The Literature of Exhaustion: Borges, Nabokov, and Barth. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1974.