Cinematicity

film & culture

Woody Allen's Radio Days and The Vast Forgotten Imagination of Radio

It's hard to imagine a time before television and the dominance of the image, but Woody Allen accomplishes just that here with a nostalgic look back on the days of radio and the vast invisible imagination it produced then.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

It's hard to imagine a time before television and the dominance of the image, but Woody Allen accomplishes just that here with a nostalgic look back on the days of radio and the vast invisible imagination it produced then.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I never forgot that New Years eve when Aunt Bee awakened me to watch 1944 come in. And I've never forgotten any of those people or any of the voices we used to hear on the radio. But the the truth is, that with each passing New Year, those voices do seem to grow dimmer and dimmer

How difficult would it be to reanimate a moment in time to make that moment appear for what it was at that moment and nothing else, to strip it of any retrospective complement or nostalgic reinvestment and have it live and breath again as if for the first time? It is in this sense that Radio Days achieves everything someone who ever dreamed of returning to a previous moment in history—even one so close as a week, let alone 70-years—could have ever wished to achieve. While most1 have rightfully praised the free-slowing, semi-structure of the film, and the warmth of feeling it conveys, some2 have criticized it, looking for a plot and a well-defined narrative to grasp onto. But, its exactly in the film's failure to be something ordinary, that we can analyze according to plot, narrative, our contemporary perspective, that its radical difference and total distinguishing uniqueness arises and that gives us so much to reflect on. The film is a kind of rupture in space-time (taken seriously), a tunnel that leads us back, however briefly, for a few moments of the old days before television and internet, to a time when the invisible fantasy of the radio broadcast then permeated the everyday life of millions. And, in its conclusion, it gives that time the opportunity to say its own farewell, the one that no time, no period in history is so lucky to receive, as one time indistinguishably transmutates into the next, before we're even aware that its irretrievably gone.

Today, we've become accustomed to the primacy of images, of representations of all things, however unimaginable, on the cinema and television screen, or in some recess of the internet. We show up at the cinema, remove ourselves from the normal flow of life, silence our phones if we're decent, and sit in darkness to watch as fictional universes of all kinds are projected for us to see in vivid high-definition, 4K-digital. Or, at the moment we think of something, have an idea pop into our heads, we flip open our phone, do a quick Google search and have not one, not two, but fifty options, perhaps many already complete, for how to accomplish or realize our momentarily uncertain inspirations. One idea connects to another, one hyper-link opens-up a new frontier of visible, legible information for us to process, to make real and visible our thoughts and dreams; and one film or trip to the cinema ends with our awaiting the next installment that will bring back, renew and expand the worlds of our fantasies. Everywhere contemporary reality is dominated by the flatness of the image and the perpetual reduction of invisible imaginaries and ideas to something concrete, specific, and visible. It is as if our imaginations have, rather than being something personal and private yet vast, expansive, unlimited, are being endlessly (re-)expropriated from us and incorporated into a vast, interconnected network imagination who's sole purpose is to translate our momentary inspirations, our invisible as-yet unformed ideas and partial dreams into something concrete and circumscribed as quickly as possible. Indeed, there is the expectation that this should happen, if not immediately, then, with some small effort to search and some short time to wait. This is a reality increasingly becoming one-dimensional and flat.

Watching this clip from Radio Days we can sense the presence of a wholly alternative mode of life. Here, in the context of the progression of the film, we are able to experience the cinematic version of listening to the radio within the context of our contemporary everyday life. Perhaps, in the '40s, we would have heard this same radio broadcast while standing in the kitchen, cooking; today, we hear the radio broadcasting as we sit watching the silent cinema screen, as the cinema is reduced to the purity of the cinematic, on the one hand (what we silently see) and, on the other, the purity of the audible, of the radio broadcast and the sports story it recounts. And even though the film does provide the kind of 'crutch' to our imaginations that radio never could have (in the form of these silent place-holder images that, ostensibly, are there to represent the events narrated by the radio broadcaster), these images are attenuated enough by having been rendered silent and uncannily distinct from the audible so as to highlight the distinctiveness of the radio broadcast and its uniqueness vis a vi what we, on account of the constructed gap or incompleteness of the cinematic and the tight coordination of the visible and audible, then imagine ourselves that transcends the purely visible of the screen. And while today the radio is primarily, although not exclusively, reduced to music, weather, news, sports, to listening while we drive or maybe while we cook in the kitchen, this moment reminds us again today that radio does hold the possibility of telling stories, of being a medium itself for the expression of stories to fuel our imagination, a fact that, today, is almost unimaginable. And while, perhaps, we've heard the story, present as a brief comedy sketch within this film, of the night H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds was first broadcast and how people mistaking it for reality were jumping out of buildings in panic at the impending alien invasion, if we actually listen to this broadcast again today, we can still be struck by how believable it is, how surprising is the use of the specificity of the (radio) medium3 that is something distinct and unique from print or film, and also how expressive is the power of this medium and its capacity to insert its fiction into our reality and turn our imaginations into actual fears and action. It is not simply the result of naive early century American simpletons who lacked any real ability to separate fact from fiction that sent people fleeing at the impending demise of humanity, but an indication of just how powerful is our connection to radio and strong its capacity to incite our imaginations to imagine the unthinkable and impossible4.

Certainly, the film is light-hearted, quickly-paced and never intended to fall into serious drama, since a drama it is not, exactly. It moves at the speed of life, or the casual memory one has of the past, constantly sound-tracked by the sounds of one radio broadcast or another and the slapstick comedy interaction between people and between people and the radio broadcast as remembered fondly, nostalgically. As with the clip above, we see in the film the entire cast's favorite programs on the radio: sports stories, psychological counseling sessions, breakfast shows, classical musical programs, Latin and World music performances: there's a program for everyone that everyone shares to some extent or another, the radio occupying a communal location in the home and people lives, present as people live their lives, rather than a special, sequestered-from-normal-reality position(like cinema, in a dark, quiet room). These shows, and the voices that broadcast them form an invisible dimension shared and inhabited by all. For the kids, its a world of comic book capers, of a search for submarines and x-ray glasses that becomes peeping from rooftops into windows to look at women and forays onto the cloudy wind-swept beaches in the afternoons to look for signs of off-shore Nazi U-Boats indicating an imminent invasion. Its an invisible world made real by dressing up in one's idea of Brazilian dress and earnings, singing along to their favorite tune, and other family-members joining-in at just the right time, as if on cue to their alternate role in life as music performers, to sing a chorus. It is a world where the invisible world broadcast on the radio is made real as the imagination—the minds mental image-making faculties5—are translated into the always specific realities of each person without precedent, in one form or another. We see in this film how radio days were wholly different from our times now, how what was imaginable formed not the body of all that we could find that was already visible, concretely and precisely formatted for our consumption, but a dimension totally dark and hidden from view, private and at the same time shared by all who listened. The imagination in radio days was like an immense dark other-world surrounding the mundane day-to-day life that charged each moment with potential and unseen possibility and was an unseen bridge of communication, a space for the emergence of sociality and a catalyst for creative inspiration within the context of life's more bleak prospects.

This clip shows the scene when, as we're told, the young Woody Allen has his most memorable moment of the radio, when he was taken by his parents on a trip to the Radio City Music Hall in downtown New York. We see them enter a huge building, with vaulted ceilings and murals rising up its sides as the arches disappear out of sight. We see a place built to live-up to the vastness of the radio imagination, a place that seems to be a concrete materialization of it6, with a scintillating multiplicity of harmonious lights broadcasting in the chandelier, steps that lead high-up into the half-light, and doors that open out onto a cinema screen and the sound of Frank Sinatra singing. The enormous black and white cinema image of two lovers kissing, performing a romantic moment of some early classic Hollywood film. It's as if, here in this moment, we are confronted with the avenue through which radio becomes cinema and what is invisible and only in the imagination spills-out into reality in the form of a building projecting fantasies we can actually see: it is the invisible imaginary potential of the radio made visible in the form of built structure and the projected light of a new media, cinema.

The film also shares something in common with Nurse Betty, or Allen's other film The Purple Rose of Cairo, the Coen Brother's recent film Hail, Caeser!, or Galaxy Quest in their attempt to portray the way in which ordinary lives become radio lives, how radio listeners become radio broadcasters (or, in the case of these films, how film-watchers becomes film-actors). In the character of Mia Farrow, we see how her unique voice finds its way to joining all of the other unique voices on the radio7 and becomes one among them who sit in fancy restaurants and clubs where broadcasts take place. We see how happenstance and completely unintentional and totally naive circumstances transform her from witness to a crime, to being driven to her execution, to expressing her dreams to be on the radio, to getting an audition for an advertisement by the mafioso about to kill her and her old mother feeding her her last meal, to interruption by the war effort and her singing for soldiers before they are shipped-out, to taking voice lessons before becoming a hallowed English-woman's voice reading the news with perfect enunciation. This, rather than a time of appearances and superficial looks, was a time of sound and the performance of voice and how the uniqueness of voice formed a criteria of selection for broadcast. It was a time when where what one heard on the radio provided the audible spectrum of guidance for what else was possible to join them and to join the famous invisible world of the radio broadcaster, that itself existed as ordinary, everyday reality: the actual Masked Avenger sitting beside you at dinner, the actual psychologists talking about their own lifes' problems over a drink at the Copacabana. The radio provided the imaginary context not only for the mass of radio listeners but also to the performers themselves, the invisible audible imaginary of radio personalities that referenced their own everyday lives, that formed an imaginary performative context, just as the cinematic does today. And so it is that we find it comical when Mia Farrow's voice, on the New Years Eve suddenly slips out of character and into incomprehensible (by her new peers) affected New Jersey drawl, like she's totally forgotten who she is for a split-second; or when she leads them all upstairs onto the rooftop to re-inscribe that rooftop, which was once the scene of a sexual debacle with a married man with the new meaning of a year now part of what she could only have dreamed she would one day be a part of, selling cigarettes and speaking in a voice she and anyone else could only have imagined was nothing short of a serious liability.

And so, as the final snow-flakes fall on that night, as the young Allen listens in on his radio at home, awoken by Aunt Bee late on that cold winter night in 1944, after catching a glimpse of the offshore U-Boat that noone would ever believe he saw or that was anything other than the product of his great imagination, this time of wonderment and invisible fantasy of the radio says its final, perfect goodbye to all that can hear its message, transmitted from a time long-past, as an ordinary, gravely-voiced, short, bald man at a party on a New Years night world cries out into the night: Beware Evil Doers, Wherever You Are!

And, despite the contradictions inherent in our unlikely hero, we believe in him, wholeheartedly.

Postmortem

Beyond the radio, and beyond the specifics of the film, there's something that Allen teaches us about art more generally in this film. And about the imagination, the real imagination and not what we think of it today. We've already noted the flatness and one-dimensionality of the world today, a world that seems to lack the vast invisible imaginary of the radio days, a world where everything we imagine can be made visible and is made visible, where what we imagine in a moment of uncertainty can, with a few clicks, some short time searching be transformed into something real that we can see, touch, and rationalize. And, certainly, we could explain this by saying there is just as much imagination today as there was then, that what we see in this film is only the product of old age nostalgia looking back on the golden years of childhood, before things made sense and had their proper place under the light of education and experience. But, something would still be missing that we get from this film and, perhaps, the disheveled and unordered and random way in which it is assembled that still, despite its resistance to format itself according to a standard narrative, communicates something, and communicates it all the more profoundly and emotionally because of it. It seems reasonable to say that there is always an unintentionality to products of the imagination, a way in which what we dream must be free to assume its own structure and to find its own logic. That there is a logic that emerges from out of the expression of ones singular imagination that doesn't come from being a product of an already established imaginary-narrative, or one that just builds on the land of Hobbits or the outer-space of 2001 or Star Trek/Wars. That there is something that we should take from the film as an expressive work as a whole, that it seems to transport us to another time and place, to experience those radio days more vividly and completely than we could have ever probably dreamed we would be able to. Something to reflect on, how a work achieves this quality of being a tunnel or portal to another time, another dimension, becomes an opening into the imagination again today, that re-opens for us in what is increasingly a grey middle-reality dictated by economic concerns devoid of ideological vision, of a constant attempt to think small, and realistically, to not, as Hillary Clinton reminds us, 'over promise'. And something to reflect on, what is actual creativity, inventiveness in this time of 'innovation' that just sees us microscopically modifying, 'recombining' amongst an already-existing spectrum of things so as to create marketable difference, of an imagination overly constrained by economic profitability. These are significant issues that go the heart of what kind of reality we, as a (cinematic) culture and as humanity, inhabit, and is something that we should take seriously. Films are more than just visible moving images, and, just like the audio of radio can be more than just audible modulated sound, they can open our mind and reality to things we've overlooked, reconnect us to our authentic imagination, and produce events that lead, then, to real, significant transformations whose trajectory and culmination we can't foresee or predict, so long as we pay full respect to the truths they express and we wish to express. That is to say, the imaginary of film isn't necessarily the image of the imaginary we see in the film.

Footnotes

  1. For instance, this one by Rogert Ebert, which does it justice.

  2. Like this one in the Washington Post, which basically misses every interesting thing about the film.

  3. See Marshall McLuhan's sightly racist, but nevertheless important, in the foundation of modern media theory and thinking on radio, essay Radio: Tribal Drum on radio and its deeper, more primitive connection to the human-being and its relationship to promoting less technologically inundated European fascist movements. In McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: the extensions of Man, p. 297.

  4. Also interesting in this respect, in the use of the medium is the CBS broadcast The Fall of the City. It's interesting in the way in which radio broadcast styles of description are used within the context of a fiction to, in effect, report on events and give them the impression of being real events, of making them believable fictions, real imaginaries. For instance, the commentator, describing something appearing in a crowd, says: 'there' something happening in the crowed, there's movement...it looks like water flowing into water...and the houses look blind in the flat heat of the sun...'

  5. See Verma, Neil. 2012. Theatre of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and the American Radio Drama, pp.1-3 and elsewhere for more.

  6. Much like Disney Land materializes in a built environment the fantasies created in its cartoons.

  7. There's the characteristically hoarse and familiar voice of Julie Kavner(Marge, from The Simpsons); the shrill and impetuous voice of Wallace Shawn (from The Princess Bride); and the all-American resonant deep voice of authority of Jeff Daniels (from The Newsroom and Dumb and Dumber).