Existential Morality in “Crimes and Misdemeanors”
How Woody Allen wrestles with God’s absence in a rotten world
Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) brings out the highs and lows of the argument from evil against God. The highs are the misdemeanors, as it were, and the lows are the crimes.
Incels, Sexual Injustice, and the Misdemeanor
The misdemeanor treated in the film is an early American formulation of the incel complaint. Clifford, the quintessential Woody Allen character, is a conscientious intellectual and documentarian who’s cursed with artistic integrity and is therefore ill-equipped to succeed in the real world. He films a documentary about an uplifting philosophy professor who ends up killing himself without much ado, and who thereby taints not just Clifford’s documentary but the aim of philosophical integrity.
To earn money Clifford takes on a job to film a celebration of his wife’s brother Lester (Alan Alda). Lester is the opposite of Clifford: handsome, successful, extroverted, gregarious, and therefore shallow, fake, narcissistic, and unscrupulous. Clifford falls in love with Lester’s associate producer, Halley (Mia Farrow), but she turns him down without offending him, giving him the “It’s not you, it’s me” line, made famous in Seinfeld.
