𝒯𝓇𝒶𝓃𝓈𝓇𝒶𝒸𝒾𝒶𝓁 𝒮𝒸𝒶𝓋𝑒𝓃𝑔𝑒𝓇 𝐻𝓊𝓃𝓉

The many merits of Woody Allen’s “Zelig” [16/24]

If, then, a whiff of hens. Yesterday (NOT The Beatles song), on the beach (NOT the Neil Young album), the light of the sun set fire to my skin, so delicate and porcelain. I tossed and turned among the motel sheets, seeking a cocoon to ward off the screaming blisters of the night. The burn of my poor face is far from fodder for a tourist’s camera, yet he stuck his lens in my direction all the same. What might happen if his head split in two? Would the brain matter spell out the piece below? Could his parting wish be for a clean copy of The Charlatan, my debut novel and therefore initial stroke of genius, the dawning of a generational talent, the spawn of the falling of the West? Perhaps!

I’ve been thinking about Leonard Z. all morning. I skipped breakfast in order to ponder. What would it feel like to wake up and discover you’d become someone else, without noticing the transformation? The film treats this profoundly unsettling notion as funny.

I start at least half of these essays with a comment about runtime—in the other half, I bury the comment in the middle.¹ For modern viewers facing the risk of perpetual dopamine machines encroaching on attention spans, the act of highlighting movies that are short exercises in duration feels like an olive branch, an alluring suggestion to step off the ship of junk content and into the clutches of the sirens of cinema. They seem to grow shorter every week: barely cresting the 79-minute mark, Woody Allen’s Zelig condenses fifty years of alternate history into a palatable package, made safe for transmission to your brain via the gallery of packing peanuts lining the walls of this cardboard box of comedy.

Choosing the mockumentary as his vessel, Allen spins a story that reimagines the first half of the 20th century if it were tethered between the two horses of narcissism and neuroses, both his; it’s a scathing indictment of sweeping lifestyle trends, based on the premise that the full arc of the recent past unfolded in his image.² The eponymous Leonard Zelig is an accidental master of disguise, adopting the unique characteristics of his peers, from stature to accent to racial identity. He’s a man whose personality is as weak as a small piece of space debris caught in the planetary gravity of everyone he meets.³

This strange case of incurable skin-shifting makes Zelig a notorious figure in both academia and entertainment: the scientific establishment rushes to diagnose and pathologize his behavior while high society trails behind, treating him like a circus freak to display for the country club.⁴ His primary caretaker, Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher (Mia Farrow), concludes that he is a chameleon, a solution quickly interpreted literally by civilization at large through a new song & dance called “The Chameleon.”

Crafted in the style of a 1920s newsreel—plus inserts of current-era intellectuals (like Susan Sontag) commenting on the faux-days-of-old—Zelig uses the established form to sneak in the driest of jokes, chief among them the endlessly repeated sight gag of Allen’s distinctive visage hiding within slightly different costumes as he poaches the details of his social surroundings.⁵ The film is relentlessly inventive in pursuit of selling the idea of this as a real story, showcasing dozens of examples of branded products and corporate sponsorship such as board games and clothing advertisements.

By fusing a fictional story with actual historical events, through superimposed images and seamless pre-digital blending techniques, Zelig offers an experience akin to Forrest Gump, eleven years in advance yet more hilarious, less seen, and drained of the generational self-worship of baby boomers.⁶ It’s a call and response in reverse, but here every story beat feels entrenched in the clever characterization of Zelig; compare this to asinine cherry-picked nostalgia and the later film comes out looking like Hallmark’s Greatest Hits of History.

Mentioned earlier, albeit briefly, the genius of Zelig lies within its acidic narrative framing: a meek mouse, who craves invisibility as a personality, becomes a template for the forward thrust of popular culture, inspiring a legion of conformists to conform to conformity.⁷ Allen positions the character as the focal point, a drain for history to circle as the masses fawn and obsess over a man with no inner life.⁸ I ruin nothing by sharing the penultimate punchline, which fulfills the previous hour of setup in spades: Allen’s savage self-loathing culminates in a scene where he edits himself into the background of one of Adolf Hitler’s speeches.⁹ An earlier news headline sums up the film’s fixation as amusement: “markets crash, and Zelig is still missing.”

Zelig would fit right in at those dinner parties from my younger days: the careful choreography of becoming whoever, or whatever, the room needed you to be. Social climbers seeking status games to play and win. Gerald mastered this art in complete totality. I wonder if I ever knew who he was underneath all that adaptive camouflage, or if the camouflage had simply become the man. Food for thought. I’m hungry.

—W.

1. My neighbor Mrs. Kowalski used to time everything: how long it took her husband to mow the lawn, how many minutes the mailman spent at each house, how long dinner conversations lasted before someone mentioned the weather. She kept detailed logs in a spiral notebook, convinced that patterns would reveal themselves through measurement. Gerald found her fascinating. “She understands that time is the only currency that matters, Wanda,” he’d say. I never understood what he meant. I saw only pathology, the type described in bimonthly periodicals.

2. Gerald had a similar ability, to reinvent our shared history based on whoever was listening. At insurance conventions, we’d met at a risk assessment seminar. At neighborhood barbecues, it was a church social. To my book club, a poetry reading at the library. After our third or fourth retelling, I stopped correcting the details. Maybe every version was true. Maybe none of them were.

3. I watched our mailman, Mr. Peterson, adapt his entire demeanor depending on which house he was approaching. Cheerful whistling for the Hendersons, respectful nod for the widow Martinez, cautious efficiency for the Dobsons, with their aggressive terrier. By the time he reached our mailbox, he’d become whoever he thought we needed him to be. Gerald said it was professional courtesy. I thought it was survival.

4. The Elks Lodge paraded Gerald around at their monthly dinners as “our most successful member.” In plainspeak, he brought in the most new applications. He’d work the room like a politician, shapeshifting ever so slightly for each conversation. The ambitious young fathers got stories about securing their children’s futures. The widowers heard about protecting what they’d already built.

5. At our anniversary party, Gerald showed slides from our honeymoon. I didn’t recognize half the photographs. There I was, supposedly, at restaurants I’d never visited, standing beside landmarks I’d never seen. When I questioned him later, he just smiled. “Memory is unreliable, Wanda. Photographs don’t lie.” But photographs can be altered, arranged, inserted into sequences where they don’t belong.

6. The casual dismissal of my historical kin irritates me more than it should. We built the suburbs, raised families during unprecedented prosperity, created the very cultural infrastructure that allows critics like this one to exist. We don’t idolize ourselves, we simply tried to construct stable lives after decades of global chaos. Gerald understood this. “Every generation thinks they invented wisdom, Wanda,” he’d say, “but wisdom is just accumulated caution.”

7. Our book club went through a phase of reading memoir. All the ladies wanted to understand how other people constructed their life stories. Gerald would sit in the kitchen during our meetings, listening to us debate what made narratives authentic versus manufactured. Later, he’d quiz me about our discussions. “What did they decide about memory versus documentation?” he’d ask. I thought he was just curious about our literary conversations.

8. The company picnics were always the strangest events. Gerald’s colleagues would bring their families, and everyone would perform their version of “normal suburban life.” The children played prescribed games while the adults discussed prescribed topics. Vacation plans, home improvements, school districts. No mention of teenagers with drug problems or the hollowed-out steel industry that used to support our town. Underneath the cheerful surface, you could sense everyone carefully monitoring the others, their fellow partygoers, making sure their performance stayed within acceptable parameters. Gerald fit in perfectly. Too perfectly.

9. The critic treats Allen’s self-insertion at a Nazi rally as mere fodder for chuckles, but this strikes me as remarkably cavalier about historical horror. Gerald’s father fought in the Pacific Theater, or so he claimed during our early years together. Later stories placed him in the European campaign, and sometimes he’d never served at all. The inconsistency bothered me less than Gerald’s casual dismissal of the entire conflict as “mass hysteria orchestrated by competing propaganda machines.” He’d wave away any mention of concentration camps or Allied heroism with that knowing smile of his. “History is written by the survivors, Wanda. The real question is who decides which stories survive.” I used to think he was being sophisticated about the complexity of war. He had extensive documentation about wartime policies on all sides: internment camps, civilian bombing campaigns, the complex political arrangements that preceded the conflict, the arms dealers that supplied both sides with munitions. Now I wonder if he was simply preparing me to doubt the reliability of any documented truth.