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Inconvenient Truths and Comforting Fictions: Cognitive Dissonance in Philosophical Interpretations of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors

The study which follows is a counterpart to an earlier paper of mine on Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) 2 , in which I perform a critical reading of the film in the context of pragmatist philosophy, especially with regard to William James’s and Richard Rorty’s concepts of truth and morality. While the present analysis also revolves around the same filmic narrative, and addresses issues related to ethics and morality, overlaps with the previous text are minimal. This paper is situated in a different conceptual and philosophical framework, and its intention is twofold: on the one hand, it is intended to be a metacritical study, insofar as its primary purpose is to analyze critical commentaries on the film, which aim to sublimate Allen’s skeptical and highly critical take on conventional approaches to ethics and morality; on the other hand, it wishes to formulate a philosophical argument in its own right. My contention is that Allen’s skepticism (in Crimes and Misdemeanors as well as in some other major films in the same period) is not merely an upshot of his artistic extravagance, but an integral part of a conceptual outlook, whereby his films in question take a consistent philosophical stance, rather than just convey an artistic vision. I will maintain that the critical analyses which aim to offer a corrective to what they deem a bleak artistic vision can be interpreted as reducing the cognitive dissonance which is generated by the discrepancy between the critics’ own moral and/or philosophical convictions and the uncompromising demystifications that Allen performs in his films.