Woddy Allen’s new film, Zelig, is a masterful job of cut and paste. Allen’s face has been pasted into newsreel footage from the twenties and thirties, and newsreel footage has been "made-up" to give verisimilitude to Zelig’s life: a group of jitter-buggers do a dance called the chameleon, sticking their tongues out like dear little lizards. "Real" footage (and for all I know the dance footage is real) has been cut from whatever it first appeared and pasted into its new context-this movie, the documentary of a made-up character, Zelig, who takes his shape, voice, coloration from whomever he’s around. He changes so that others will like him, or at least won’t hurt him: you have to, as the old American saying goes, go along to get along, and Zelig goes along in a big way, wholeheartedly, outer shape included. With a black jazz band he’s black with the bearded he’s bearded, with the fat he’s fat. It’s the American melting pot at every moment, and Zelig is the immigrant’s child, learning to be a real American. His parents, he says, beat his sister, his sister beats him, the neighbors oneself, and perhaps even get into their country club?

Zelig is a fake documentary, or a documentary fiction, to a greater, more self-conscious degree than Mailer’s Armies of the Night, or Capote’s In Cold Blood were non —fiction novels. It’s a little post-modernist night music that plays with the boundaries of forms, just as it plays with the infinitely malleable boundaries of the main character’s shape-shifting form, his body. Zelig, critics have said, lacks heart, and indeed it does. Its power, which is considerable I think, if not overwhelming, comes, like that of Italo Calvino’s stories, not from one’s involvement with the fate of a character- that mournful, weepy, cathartic satisfaction with the fate of another soul which we are, I suppose, supposed to be beyond, just as post-industrial society has gone beyond the smokestack, the coal-burning factories’ tales of muscle, will and blood replaced by the smooth, nearly silent disembodied operations of the computer. The self now is-we know, we know-only a text, but not even a text on a piece of paper. It comes and goes on the word processor’s video screen, and can be erased, by touching the delete button, leaving the screen-unlike a sheet of paper-without even the trace of a memory of the character’s previous fate or of his beard. The pleasures of Allen’s films come not from involvement with the imagined other, but from the surprising unfolding of a metaphor, the delightful high-level play of metaphor and form. It is the charge of watching the animated duck (Daffy) take up the pen and re-draw himself, or Winsor McKay’s comic strip character, Little Sammy Sneeze’s achoo, which shatters the comic strip panel and leaves Sammy sitting in a welter of black lines. It is the pleasure primarily of, as Roland Barthes would say, the intersection of different languages, languages criss-crossing each other-in this case the languages of hyper-realism (the documentary language which assert this must be so, for there is a picture of it), of fiction, and of the stand-up comic Woody Allen, whose other biting incarnations (and Zelig is certainly in line with the others) have given us so much pleasure. (And Allen’s jokes, his little parodies of philosophical mock-profound obscurantism that end with mundane pies in the face, have often depended in large, as in small, on this crossing of languages.)

The basic metaphor in Zelig’s play of metaphors is an old, tried, yet surprisingly engaging one still, at least in this comicform. I’m like a fat man, I’m like a black man, I’m the very stuff of metaphor itself, the metaphor for metaphor. This is the metaphor of the chameleon character, the very word that Keats uses when he absence of character —of the poet himself. "As to the poetical Character itself… it is not itself-it has not self-it is everything and nothing-It has not character-it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated-It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion Poet. A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no identity-he is continually in for —and filling some other Body." Given such a character, Keats adds, a poet isn’t the bearded mild-mannered man of today. Woody Allen gives this bit as he does all of this metaphor of metaphors-a nice comic embodiment, when Zelig is prosecuted by al those who claim that he has once, in one incarnation or another, married them.

Keats feels the absence of self as a loss: the poet, that nothing, the most unpoetical of anything in existence, cannot be a hero, cannot reveal himself (n one home to reveal). The ability to go out of oneself, once the joy of festival days, of carnival time when high and low exchanged places and wore each other’s costumes, becomes the curse of a host of twentieth-century characters, like Mann’s artist protagonists. Woody Allen’s work goes one step farther, modern to post-modern. First time tragedy, second time farce, and now we’re at the third through nth time, traveling around the same circuit again, self —consciously. Once upon a time this going out of oneself, this becoming another was festival stuff. It became the grief of the aristocratic consciousness of the artist when he took up his role as independent producer. Now, happily, it has become once more the stuff of mass entertainment. Nowadays we’re all outsiders, all poets, and the unhappy consciousness of a sublime emptiness is our common property. The theory being this: each day capitalism reminds us that we’re interchangeable integers, so much abstract labor power. Each night it reweaves the sense of personality that it has unwoven during the day, reversing Penelope’s labors. We’re offered new personalities for the old, Calvin Klein jeans, a different style of life. Money is the universal solvent of personality, but it allows us to dye ourselves any color at all-if we have the wherewithal. Our identities are so much cut and paste, picking up bits and pieces that we like, as I have for years stolen bits and snatches of Woody Allen’s style and worked them into dinner table conversation. Woody Allen’s least successful movie-Play It Again Sam- has this as its central joke: the main character, in order to make it with women, gets advice on how to pick up bits of Humphrey Bogart. But his best movies move more quickly than that. For pleasure isn’t in the impossible dream of being a hero, having a single indivisible voice, the gesture that reveals a soul-or even in the dream of that dream, in imitating an imitation of one like Allen imitating Bogart imitating Sam Spade: pleasure is in the quick change. The most one is an emptiness, a space between. There is a giddy sense of liberation to this, the pleasures of the modern--marrying a different woman every night because every night one is a different man. That is the joy of it.

Woody Allen’s continual irony is, in part, the sign that he knows that his or our identities are made-up things. One indicates by ironic unsaying that one knows that one is a fiction, only playing a part. The sad ironies of his characters, the self-deprecation that draws attention to the self by drawing attention to its absence, are the painful fabric of his persona. This is the impossible situation that a writer like Barthes summarizes in answering the question of who makes up the self, who writes the self, by saying that writing is a metaphor without brakes, that writing writes. Nowadays we’re all poets. But there’s no one to sign the poem. That’s the pain of it, and it’s the pathos that Zelig concentrates on.

Of course, one can set out on the discovery of a true self, the psyche, the soul. We have doctors for it, psychoanalysts. They are the ones who one can believe still believe in souls, and so they can lead one on the endless voyage of self-discovery. Of course if the truth of our world is that our very means of earning a livelihood strips the self away only to sell it back to us, then psychoanalysis, the weaving of a soul, isn’t the discovery of something there, but only another up-scale consumer product, and the process is likely to stretch out to infinity, as Freud himself feared in "Psychoanalysis, Terminable and Interminable." (Allen himself has been in an analysis of legendary length.) Of course, the analyst became an analyst by believing that his analyst believed that one could someday finds one’s soul, and so he believes that he might someday find his. (And perhaps that analyst just believed that his analyst has believed….A case of it being enough to believe that someone else believes…back to the authorizing voice of Freud.) Such believers-those who believe that the quest is possible, even if they themselves haven’t accomplished it-are the closest we come to heroes, and so the "hero," though not the protagonist of Zelig, is Zelig’s psychiatrist, touchingly played by Mia Farrow.

She succeeds. To cure him she must get him to reveal-by hypnosis-the cause of his malady: his fear of being hurt, his desire to pass, and to pass unscathed. He fears others, of course, because he is so angry himself, and perhaps the funniest scene in the film comes when Allen reveals his anger towards Mia Farrow for serving him leaden uneatable meals that he secretly hates. The anger-not quite the volcanic rage one might expect-is the last secret of the poor empty soul. It was there on the surface of his films in any case, in the way Allen’s edgy character has pushed others to the margins of the screen. Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, though the title character, has little to characterize her beside her repeatedly saying la-de-dah. As Andrew Sarris has pointed out, Allen’s comedies have none of the convivial sparring of the comedies of the thirties and forties, of Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant going at each other and at their mutual work in His Girl Friday. The larger the emptiness being sheltered, the smaller the secret, the bigger the balloon, and the less room for others, whoever they are. But that puts more pathos into Allen’s situation-or ours-that Zelig allows, Mia Farrow cures Zelig of his bad angel, but she cures him of his good angel, but she cures him of his good angel as well. At the end he is a slightly pudgy man with an empty smile, and of no particular interest to us other than that he was once the chameleon.