Perhaps It’s Time to Deconstruct Woody

I fondly recall a semester with a UCLA philosophy professor who steadfastly maintained that Soren Kierkegaard was actually a master satirist and that every tortured word he wrote on the nature of faith and Christianity was basically a goof on an imaginary overly solemn philosopher character who might have these weird religious obsessions. That Kierkegaard--always kidding around!

As, then, I must reluctantly conclude that Adam Carl is serious when he claims that Woody Allen is actually playing Philip Roth in “Deconstructing Harry” (“That’s Not Woody in ‘Harry,’ It’s Philip,” Counterpunch, Dec. 22).

Carl points out all the striking similarities between Roth and Allen and concludes that the title character in “Deconstructing Harry” “is not based on Woody in any substantive way.”

I presume undiscovered independent filmmaker Carl is trying to score some points with Allen in demonstrating that he is unlike those “audience members and critics alike [who] tend to subscribe to the misguided notion that [Allen] is always playing himself.” It is certainly true that, circa “What’s New, Pussycat?” and “Bananas,” Allen was playing a character created out of easy nebbish shtick, which he could easily inhabit.

But since “Annie Hall,” and certainly since “Manhattan,” Allen has been letting the mask progressively slip away, and he has become simultaneously more and less honest. To see Allen in that “60 Minutes” damage-control interview he granted at the time of the Mia Farrow blowup, steadfastly maintaining that, no, that character I play in my movies isn’t me, has nothing to do with me, no relation to my life whatsoever (as the network obligingly unreeled clips from film after film of Allen betraying older lovers and romancing beautiful girls in their teens and early 20s), was to behold the power of denial.

Even now, in “Deconstructing Harry,” as Allen’s loathsome doppelganger finally “decides . . . to drop all pretense of disguise entirely and just be himself,” Allen is still saying “it isn’t me.” It is likely that as his screen alter ego comes closer to the truth and is unveiled as an increasingly unlovely human being, Allen the filmmaker increasingly needs to cling to that last line of defense. Certainly, if one were to see oneself truly revealed as Harry Block, with no psychological defense against that truth, it would be hard to know how one would go on living.

What is not likely is that Woody Allen is interested in making movies about Philip Roth, nor that Philip Roth has been writing novels about Woody Allen.

ANDREW CHRISTIE, Los Angeles