IRRATIONAL MAN: An Exploration Of “The Existential Problem”

Woody Allen‘s perennial dialogue of death and futility is upon us, and, as someone who takes comfort in the recurring anguish of Mr. Allen‘s films, I couldn’t be happier with his 2015 iteration, Irrational Man. He executes a story equivalent in scope to what has become one of the auteur’s main ambitions these fifty years: to consummate, with increasing clarity – and theatrically framed within the grips of an inescapable, cosmic, and hilarious irony – a conscientious exploration of The Existential Problem. Not without falling victim to the routine foibles of Allen‘s filmmaking, Irrational Man triumphs in the conception and execution of the hero’s two climatic decisions.

The Professor Makes His Entrance

Joaquin Phoenix is Abe Lucas, incoming philosophy professor at fictional Braylen College. His undisguised drinking problem is matched only by an equally apparent existential-despair problem, which – if you’ve never heard of it – might be described by its sufferers as a kind of midlife crisis of the wise. If you’ve seen the film’s trailer, or if by my description alone you find Abe vaguely familiar, it might be because he, like so many of Allen‘s characters, resonates with a very hazy and unconfirmed cultural stereotype.

Think about it: the jaded professor taken to the bottle and public displays of nihilism (Abe, at one point, in front of terrified students, plays Russian roulette with himself). Allen plays with stereotypes, with smatterings of cultural touchstones, and so writes his characters on a border between cliché and sincere representation. The paradox is that at times they appear to us as new clichés, ones we might have never heard of, but recognize all the same. We’re comforted by an acquaintance with what’s onscreen, and Allen is able (but not always willing) to intrigue us by subverting expectation.

To make room for the film’s lengthy denouement, circumstances unfold rapidly for our hero in the beginning. No sooner has he arrived in what must be the liberal-arts-college-mandated Volvo, than he’s in front of the classroom (the suspiciously traditional-looking sort one tends to see on film).

We should briefly note how the film borrows its title and much of its content from William Barrett’s 1958 book, credited with importing to America, in layman’s terms and lively prose, key principles of the existential movement. Until the fervent philosophical scene of the post-war era, in which the world tried to come to terms with enlightenment reason’s failure to protect against the violence of two World Wars, existentialism had largely been confined to the various home countries of its exponents in continental Europe. Abe’s lectures and discussions with colleagues remain squarely among the cadre of thinkers examined in Barrett’s book, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Sartre, and he’s an obvious symbol of the concerns at the heart of the book: man’s misplacement in the masses, the unavoidable meditation on death in a godless era, and the impotence and loss of vitality as instinct gives way to reason.

A Love Triangle of Sorts

Though if Irrational Man (the book) is a convincing summary of centuries’ worth of ideas, Abe’s is an at times questionable recitation of this summary. This has more to do with Allen‘s dialogue than Phoenix’s performance, the majority of which is flawless. The morbid philosopher nevertheless steadily becomes the object of two women’s desire, a professor, Rita (Parker Posey), and Jill (Emma Stone), a student in his class.

Rita, who is similarly aged and situated in a workaday regularity of professorship, is taken by Abe’s possession of what must be ‘edge’ in the world of higher ed. She sees potential for personal invigoration in his dispassion, as if the exoticism of his crisis – it’s very European, brooding, French – that his crisis will facilitate a long desired move from above uniformity’s abyss. She hatches a vague plan to sweep the philosopher off his somber feet to the continent across the pond, from whence all that brooding originally came. Posey‘s performance is thorough and well-rounded in a way that you’ll be surprised to learn came out of very limited access to the script, but then again not entirely surprising from one of Hollywood’s most under-appreciated actors.

Whereas Rita’s motives are born out of the kind of quiet desperation only middle age can generate, the gossiping and buoyant Jill doesn’t yet have enough skin in the existential game, as it were, to need Abe as a distraction, or as any answer to her problems. She’s young, he’s old, unfamiliar and exciting, which means, for her, Abe is not of the world, but in her world, an abstraction to be understood through possession. This distinction between ‘worlds’ sounds like it’d be universally true, but is made especially in light of youth’s supreme selfishness. There’s a violence, or at the least an injustice, that runs through Jill’s subtle attempt to consume Abe in this way, and there are times when Abe’s life itself depends on her fixation on preserving her own, individual world.

The Solitary Traveler

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Woody Allen film without the requisite male sap, and as Jill courts Abe in the course of  platonic outings, Roy (Jamie Blackley), Jill’s doting boyfriend, stays behind to fill this role. The film spends much of its first act developing the relatively uneventful connections between Abe, Jill, Rita, and Roy, while also cementing Abe’s status as a truly unhappy man. Besides his Russian roulette fiasco, and the addiction he develops to his flask, we often find Abe on the precipice of a rock formation on the edge of the sea, to which he looks out forlornly (until, in later parts of the film, he does so with serenity, and contentment, though we can’t really talk about why).

This iconography of the solitary traveller is an allusion to Caspar David Friedrich’s early eighteenth-century painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. The figure of the wanderer, in the culture of Romanticism, is a tragic hero on a quest for the sublime. It is to a force greater than oneself that the wanderer looks out, and here at the sea, Abe, as the film’s tragic hero, is reminded, again and again, how the expanse exceeds his vision, how it exceeds the capacities of the senses.

Conclusion

However, Abe is not a romantic, but an existentialist. Ultimately, he does not seek transcendence through a sublime landscape, but instead finds it through the freedom to make a choice which transcends conventional moral wisdom, the kind instructed by society. Allen‘s insight into this furnishes the film’s crucial turning point. Abe and Jill overhear, from the booth behind them in a diner, a woman telling her friends of a dishonest, borderline corrupt judge, who, against all logic regarding the welfare of the woman’s children, insists on awarding custody to the inept father.

Kant argues that the constitution of the self takes place at the very moment of its dissolution, and Abe, after hearing the woman’s plight, makes a decision that puts him on the course of the solitary existential traveler. The remainder of the film, in the execution of Abe’s decision and both its realistic and comic consequences, is consistently entertaining and, for the most part, completely unexpected. The final climatic event  – a result of Abe’s second big decision – persists with the viewer, demanding that the question it leaves open be answered: namely, is Abe a tragic hero, or is he . . . well, you’ll see.

What did you think of Abe’s final decision (warning: answers will likely contain spoilers)?

Irrational Man is currently being shown in cinemas in the U.S. and will be released in the U.K. on September 11. For international release dates, click here.

(top image source: Sony Pictures Classics)