Zelig (1983)

Zelig (1983) How can anyone watch a Woody Allen film with innocence any more? Mia Farrow as distraught Dr. Eudora Nesbit Fletcher stares into the newsreel camera , wondering where her neurotic patient, the chameleon Zelg, has disappeared.  Is the inability to commit to an authentic identity the psychological trauma that Woody Allen had spent years of psychoanalysis to cure? Or is his willingness to become whoever you want him to be the only way he can maintain the illusion of a relationship? Regardless, this collaboration with cinematographer Gordon Willis experiments a decade before digital technology to create a one-joke punchline about the perils of mass conformity, and in the process becomes a comedy of Fake News.

 

Flickers resurrect beloved stars,

But what you see is rarely what you get.

Even Cary Grant would like to be Cary Grant.

 

 

Animated Koko the clown never ages,

As cryogenics gives way to

Holograms of Frank Zappa in concert.

 

The sooner identity becomes iconic,

So do the birth and death dates

For a culture awash in immortality.

 

But do the dead in these newsreels ask

“Who are these strange people among us

And where did they come from?”

 

Deep Nostalgia technology

Can reanimate an image of

Kafka before tuberculosis.

 

“Who is there?” the Cyclops screams.

“No man,” replies the wily Greek.

“Then no man has blinded me!”

 

 

Gimpel, the holy fool, seeks comfort

By blending into the wallpaper of time,

Blessed by the banality of evil.

 

[Disposable Poem March 15, 2021]

Dr. Mike