Like most gagmen who earn their living by making fun of people, Woody Allen can recognize the ridiculous in everyone but himself….

Allen's strained seriousness and inadvertent humor are … on display in his latest film, Manhattan…. As always, his writing and directing are aimed at marketing his own virtue, or rather that of his familiar persona, here christened Isaac Davis….

Allen's persona was appealing in the past because he was such a loser; he reassured audiences about their own inadequacies—that nothing succeeds like failure. Beginning with Annie Hall, however, the filmmaker—perhaps sensitive to the declining status of "losers" and "victims" in our egocentric age—changed his formula. Now, winning seems to be all there is for his one-time schlemiel, who is unchanged in other respects. (p. 21)

[Davis scores with Mary Wilke] …, the on-again off-again mistress of his married best friend…. Because Isaac and Mary hate each other at first sight, we know they will presently fall in love. The reasons for their initial dislike, though, are an important clue to the hidden message of Manhattan.

When they first meet at an art gallery, Mary—a vaguely "literary" journalist—derides Isaac's preference for plexiglass sculptures she considers "purely derivative"; she also praises some minimalist steel cubes that he had found incomprehensible, expounding on their "negative capability." Later, she mocks what she calls "The Academy of the Overrated"—a group that includes Kierkegaard, Ingmar Bergman, Heinrich Böll, Isak Dinesen, and others who are all heroes to Isaac (and to Allen). It is clear we are supposed to regard her—at least at the start—as irritating or even downright unpleasant; her opinions are expressions of snobbery, rooted in cultural and psychological insecurity. But why should the director take pot shots at his own beliefs—especially by using as a mouthpiece a woman his persona ultimately loves?

A decade ago, when mores were rapidly changing, Allen successfully began to exploit his audiences' social insecurity by giving them someone to condescend to—his lovable and "nonthreatening" schlemiel. In the post-"New Sensibility" era, when artistic standards are in disarray or nonexistent, Allen is catering to the widespread cultural insecurity by providing—a target. Because the shnook has in the meantime been transformed into a "winner," he can hardly assume the role. The only possible solution is to create a pretentious, trendy intellectual who on the one hand is unsympathetic—so that the Allen persona and Allen himself are spared being labeled pretentious or trendy—and on the other hand speaks in properly highbrow rhetoric—so that Allen cannot be accused of philistinism. To top it all off, Isaac gets to bed Mary, thus establishing his superiority by conquest.

In other words, Allen is an anxious middlebrow. He wants to reassure both his audience and himself that it is really all right to be square, that one should not be intimidated by the highbrows. To this end, the best defense is a good offense—reverse snobbery (like the reverse chic of wearing fatigue jackets). For what counts is not genuine understanding, it is having the right attitudes—as prescribed by Allen, of course, who has a reasonably bright undergraduate's knowledge of art, literature and philosophy.

No wonder the inhabitants of his Manhattan are a homogeneous crowd of upper-middle-class, graduate-school-educated writers, critics, professors, and other middlebrows on the fringes of the literary world. These are the people who make it possible to read reviews instead of books, who predigest experience for vicarious intellectual thrill seekers. These are the people Allen pictures in his film because they are also the audience—and will therefore love this movie about themselves. (pp. 21-2)

At one point, Isaac-Allen describes himself perfectly: "He longed to be an artist but balked at the necessary sacrifices." Until he stops selling out by flattering his audiences, and until he can be serious without undercutting himself a moment later in a paroxysm of middlebrow anxiety, Woody Allen will continue to be a pathetic clown. (p. 22)