There is a moment toward the end of Woody Allen’s 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo where Hollywood actor Gil Shepherd confronts the fictional character he portrayed in a movie, Tom Baxter. They are both fighting for the affections of a star-struck waitress, to whom Tom professes, “I love you. I’m honest, dependable, courageous, romantic, and a great kisser.” Gil fires back, “And I’m real!” This deceptively simple exchange is, in actuality, a prime example of the film’s existential argument: that fiction, with its consistent attributes and qualities, is in a sense more real (and more definable) than the ever-changing reality. By comparing writer/director Allen’s art and ideas to that of the more blatantly existential playwright Luigi Pirandello, as well as that of philosophers Alfred Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, the above argument can thus be clarified and defended.
The Purple Rose of Cairo centers around the tragic heroine of Cecilia (Mia Farrow), a Depression-era waitress who’s married to an unemployed, abusive lout named Monk (Danny Aiello). While Monk spends his time gambling, womanizing, and keeping his wife home with the alternate use of grovels and threats, Cecilia’s only mode of escape is the movies. After being fired from her job for daydreaming, Cecilia seeks solace in the local theater, repeatedly viewing its latest feature, The Purple Rose of Cairo. As her eyes focus on the handsome character of Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), his eyes finally acknowledge hers. Mystified by her repeated presence, and stricken with sudden love, Tom walks off the screen and into Cecilia’s life.
Studio moguls are aghast, audience members are bewildered, and Gil Shepherd (also Daniels), the actor who portrayed Tom, is called in to help search for his fictional self. Meanwhile, Tom attempts to romance Cecilia, while discovering that he’s ill-prepared to exist in real life (he carries only fake money, expects a “fade out” to occur before making love, etc). Fearing for his career, Gil has a chance encounter with Cecilia, and after learning of her companionship with Tom, attempts to woo her away from his fictional character while professing his supposedly ‘real’ love for her. Cecilia is now romantically torn between the two men, and is forced to make decision that will determine the fate of all three corners of the love triangle. While all of this is occurring, the characters left on the screen bicker amongst themselves, throw snide remarks at the audience, fear of “being annihilated” (a.k.a. the projector turning off), and have their chance to ponder the meaning of their own existence.
Tom finally returns to the theater with Cecilia, and takes her up into the screen with him for a night on the town, full of nightclubs, dancing, and champagne (which is portrayed by ginger ale, much to Cecilia’s shock). Yet the lovers’ night is interrupted by Gil, who stands in the empty theater, and expresses his “real” devotion to Cecilia. Finally, Cecilia descends from the screen, and chooses reality (Gil) over fiction (Tom, who wanders back into the screen, devastated). The studio promptly destroys all prints of Purple Rose, while Cecilia leaves Monk. Upon her return to the theater, she finds that Gil has abandoned her for his career, and she is left back at square one. Once again, her eyes seek consolation in the flicker of the film screen.
Sixty-four years previous to Purple Rose’s release, Sicilian playwright Luigi Pirandello unleashed a play entitled Six Characters In Search of an Author, a work of art that remarkably mirrors the existential quandaries Allen had used as the focus of his film. In the play, a theatre troupe’s rehearsal is interrupted by the appearance of six fictional characters that have been abandoned by the playwright who created them. The characters, which consist of archetypical dysfunctional family members such as Father and Stepdaughter, demand that the actors allow them to have their story told, much to the Producer’s dismay. Once the characters finish acting out their story, they are permanently frozen in their emotional state, with the exception of the Stepdaughter, whose realized destiny has given her the ability to leave the stage, and laugh mockingly as she parades through the audience and into the lobby.
Pirandello, whose radical existentialism led him to acquiring the name “Son of Chaos”, once stated, “Everything that lives, by the very fact that it lives, has form, and by that same fact must die; except the work of art, which precisely lives forever, in so far as it is form.” (Cambon 38) In an effort to prove this belief, he wrote Six Characters, which depicted fictional creations experiencing conscious suffering while being condemned to repeatedly play out their tragic story. This made them more real than the flesh-and-blood theater troupe, whose cold obsession with the box office reveals them to be hollow portals for the stories they portray. Their lack of defining characteristics and emotion virtually disappear behind the distinguishable archetypes and eternal emotional arches of fictional beings that live on in their place.
In Purple Rose, Woody Allen explores and affirms these exact ideas in the characters of Tom and Gil. While Tom may be a fictional creation, his characteristics are real and consistent. Every facial expression he makes and every line of dialogue he utters holds no ambiguity or deceptive layers; what they look like or say is what they are. As philosophy professor Sander H. Lee observed, every line in Tom’s Purple Rose (the film-within-the-film) is used merely to “advance the plot.” (Lee 84) Every word Tom says has an equally pure goal; when he wishes to express his love for Cecilia, he says “I love you.” His personality traits (honesty, dependability, etc) have been hard-wired into him by his creators, which thus make him an entirely consistent being. Even during moments of temptation, such as when he is seduced by adoring prostitutes, Tom holds firm to his devotion to Cecilia. The fact that his one-dimensional personality can be defined at all is what ultimately labels him as fiction, in an existential context.
On the flip side is Gil, who spends the majority of the film deceiving Cecilia by putting on the Hollywood charm he used to portray Tom with, in an effort to temporarily romance her. But behind each of his actions, are hidden motives to preserve his rising career by forcing Tom back onto the screen. None of Gil’s feelings about anything are ever obvious or easily defined, except for his obsession with success (mirroring the box office desires of the theater troupe from Six Characters). After acting sweet and humble while asking Cecilia to take him to Tom, Gil immediately veers into savage anger when confronting his fictional self (thus exposing his promise to “not be angry” as a lie). Even the frown his face elicits at the end (during his plane ride back to Hollywood) can be read multiple ways; he could either be expressing regret over abandoning Cecilia, or he could simply be air-sick (a condition he previously mentioned having). Ultimately, Gil is playing the role of a man in love during the course of the film, while Tom is nothing but a man in love. Like the Pirandello’s theater troupe, Gil’s emotional abyss allows him to experience no suffering, while Tom (being an emotional construct) can only love, and thus can only suffer once he is ditched by Cecilia.
From a purely philosophical standpoint, Purple Rose is immediately evocative of such writings as Alfred Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Both stories involve characters that are trapped in an endless cycle of events from which they have no escape. While this comparison may at first seem to be a diversion from the main argument, it helps to establish fiction as the ideal and reality as the empty place. In Purple Rose, there are two types of Sisyphus: the characters in the film, and the Cecilia, who repeatedly attends the theater to view them. While Cecilia knows her life may never be as glamorous and grand as the ones she watches on the screen, she thrives on the daydream that it will. Similarly, Sisyphus knows that no matter how many times he rolls the rock up the hill, he will never reach the “summit” and the rock will just roll back down again. And yet, as Camus writes, “The struggle toward the summit is sufficient to fill the heart of a man. We must imagine that Sisyphus is happy.” (Bree 208) We must also imagine Cecilia is happy at the film’s end, as she settles into her reliable pattern of staring up at the happiness she craves, and yet allowing her heart to fill with the joyful possibility of one day reaching the heights (although it’s doubtful she ever will).
Like a fictional being in relation to an actor’s hollowness, the events of a film become more real for the viewer than his/her own real experience of viewing it. Although both are recurring events, the film itself has real closure (punctuated by a final fade-out), while the viewer’s experience has no closure afterward (punctuated by leaving the theater). The film-going experience is thus revealed to affirm the power of fiction over reality. In the same way an actor disappears into a character, the audience disappears into the experiences of the onscreen characters. During this experience, the audience sits motionless, with faces as blank as an empty page that is eagerly awaiting the text of a story to be written upon it. While viewers may experience varying levels and types of emotion in their everyday lives, film provides distinct emotions in their purest and most ideal form (such as total amusement, devastation, joviality, etc). Afterward, viewers may attempt to recapture the emotions they felt while watching the film. Once again, fiction proves itself to be the real, tangible depth of feeling, which flesh-and-blood beings (notably Cecilia) use to fill up the void in their empty, temporary existences.
On a deeper level, however, Purple Rose seems even more evocative of Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of “existence preceding essence.” According to Sartre’s atheistic beliefs, there is no God, and therefore no predetermined meaning for each of our lives to follow. In Sartre’s own words, “there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is.” (Abel 387) Thus, our personalities, our characteristics, our choices, and our futures are entirely up to us to decide and define. Yet how do we define ourselves in an existence without definition or meaning? The answer is shockingly simple: we create meaning, through the use of patterns, rules, fables, and artwork that establish an essence that we can mold our lives after. Initially, it seems that this theory may contradict the central argument that fiction is more real than reality, since a fictional artwork’s essence was determined by its creator before it existed. The characters in Purple Rose each have a significant essence that the filmmaker has created them to capture (the love interest, the comic relief, etc). Cecilia, however, has no such consolable characteristics, and since her present existence is wrought with poverty and misery, she imagines a fictional essence for herself in the cinema (perhaps the love interest for Tom).
Yet the implication of Sartre’s argument of ‘man as nothing but what he makes of himself’ is found in the all-encompassing statement that ‘you are what you do.’ In the context of Purple Rose, Cecilia may dream of a better life, yet when she has the chance to earn a better living by having a job, her constant daydreaming makes her clumsy and gets her fired. Cecilia only fantasizes about what the fictional characters onscreen actually do repeatedly during each screening. It is the fictional Tom who makes the first move, by leaving the rigid constraints of the cinema, and entering the chaotic reality to be with Cecilia. Through this singular action alone, Tom betrays his own predetermined essence to create an existence for himself that he believes will lead to happiness. Hence, the fictional Tom creates his own essence (thus making him real), while the flesh-and-blood churchgoer Cecilia continuously searches for an essence she believes to be predetermined (thus making her less real).
Even Atheist writer/director Allen mirrors the philosophy of Camus, by making nearly one film a year, while remaining vocal about being unhappy with his own work (much like Sisyphus, who repeatedly strives to achieve an impossible goal). Yet, as Sartre may have put it, Allen must seek contentment in the fact that his work creates meaning in an existence he believes to be thoroughly meaningless. No wonder Allen himself has referred to Sartre as “romantic…great fun to read.” (Lee 223) Allen even compares film to God, during a scene when Cecilia explains, to a clueless Tom, how church provides her with “a reason for everything. Eh, otherwise, i-i-it-it’d be like a movie with no point and no happy ending.” (Allen 408) In the same way film creates meaning in the lives of real people, so does religion, which in the long run becomes more real (and ever-lasting) than its temporarily existing believers.
And so, the focus returns to the exchange between Gil and Tom toward the end of the film. Tom’s argument that he is “honest, dependable, etc” reveals attributes as pure and unchanging as those of Pirandello’s six characters, as repetitious as those of Camus’s Sisyphus, and an essence that (although predetermined) gives him a clearer and more definable existence. If ‘man simply is’, then ‘Tom simply is honest, dependable, etc.’ Gil’s comeback “And I’m real!” solidifies the sad truth that reality is the only argument Gil can make about his own existence. The attributes Gil possess change countless times, and thus make his essence less definable, and therefore less real. Cecilia discovers that when she chooses reality over fiction, she loses all hope of finding reliable happiness. In conclusion, Woody Allen’s overall belief truly seems to be that “film ought to win over reality.” (Conrad 107) And if there is a philosophical victory at the end of The Purple Rose of Cairo, it is that the realm of unchanging fiction will always be more real than our superficial reality.
Bibliography:
Abel, Donald C. Fifty Readings in Philosophy; Second Edition. New York, New York: The
McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2004.
Allen, Woody. Three Films of Woody Allen. New York, New York: Random House, Inc.,
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Bree, Germaine. Camus; Revised Edition. New York, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
Inc., 1964
Cambon, Glauco. Pirandello. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.
Conrad, Mark T. & Skoble, Aeon J. Woody Allen and Philosophy. Peru, Illinois: Carus
Publishing Company, 2004.
Lee, Sander H. Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland
& Company, Inc., 2002.
The Purple Rose of Cairo. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, and Danny
Aiello. Metro Goldwyn Mayer: 2001.
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