(5 of 8)
That is why last year's Interiors was so important to his development. He forbade himself any jokes at all and forced himself to face up to the questions of how and why loving relationships fail—Annie's softly stated theme sternly reconsidered. The movie did not work. The avoidance of humor is as false to experience as an excess of it. In Manhattan he has found a balance, an organic relationship between wit and his characters' actions. We begin to see that it is not just through jokes that we practice denial of dread. Just about everything his people do here is a form of denial. Even ex-Wife Meryl Streep's devastating book is one, since it denies all that must have been good for a time in the marriage. Isaac's friend, the one he keeps exchanging his girlfriend with (the roles are expertly played by Michael Murphy and Diane Keaton), is supposed to be committed to writing an important book. His wife (Anne Byrne) keeps asking him to make another sort of commitment, to drop out of the rat race and begin to have children. Instead, he wastes his substance on a Porsche sports car, for which he has no conceivable need. And what is Keaton's endless chat about art, so superficial and vacuous (she and Murphy have an "Academy of the Overrated" in which they place, with much laughter, great artists they do not regard as chic, including Mahler, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Heinrich Boll), but a way of denying its power to raise discomfiting truths. It is also a way to avoid making any real creative commitment herself. On the same day, she is seen writing a review of Tolstoy's letters for a little magazine and indulging in that most superfluous of literary activities, novelizing a screenplay.
Allen, in fact, sees everything all his people do, especially their sexual la ronde, as a gigantic denial. Late in the picture, dictating an idea for a story, Isaac says, "People in Manhattan are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves that keep them from dealing with more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe."