Magic in the Moonlight: Nietzsche & Woody

Another Woody Allen film means more allusions to philosophy. “Magic in the Moonlight” takes its Nietzsche seriously, even if critics dismiss Allen’s lines about the German thinker as little more than namedropping.

Colin Firth plays Stanley, an English magician with the stage name Wei Ling Soo. Beckoned to the French Riviera by an old friend – a less famous and deviously envious magician – Stanley cancels plans to visit the Galapagos Islands. His errand is to expose Sophie, a spiritualist from Kalamazoo played by Emma Stone, who is defrauding a Pittsburgh coal heiress.

As his initial Darwin-minded destination hints, Stanley is a rationalist quite intolerant of quacks and mystics. That includes Christians. “I think Mr. Nietzsche has disposed of the God matter rather convincingly!” harrumphs Stanley, who gives Hobbes a shout-out too.

When a Washington Post interviewer told Allen his new film “evokes at least two of life’s most rewarding subjects to contemplate: the South of France and God,” the New York director quipped: “Right. At least the South of France exists!”

Sophie is an intuitive Nietzschean, channeling his view that illusions are necessary aids for living. Although that is not necessarily bad, for her line of work. As Stone puts it in the film’s press notes: “We want stories, we want fairy tales, we want myths.”

Allen made that same point in an interview two years ago: “the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself. … It was said by Nietzsche, it was said by Freud, it was said by Eugene O’Neill. One must have one’s delusions to live.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is the philosopher cited most often in American films. Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Kant get mentions, but not their ideas. That which does not kill you only makes you stronger is one Nietzcheism that screenwriters like, if not footnote, as in “The Fifth Element” and “Conan the Barbarian.”

Or, as Eddie Murphy’s character cracks in “Coming to America”: :The guys that work here don’t quote Nietzsche.” Characters in “Annie Hall” and “Hannah and Her Sisters” do cite Nietzsche by name. He also appears in Allen’s comic writing on “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Diet Book” and in “My Speech to the Graduates.”

In the pre-Code film “Baby Face” (1933) a heavily accented cobbler from the old country opens a book titled “Will To Power” and tutors Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Erie, Pa:

“A woman, young, beautiful like you, can get anything she wants in the world. Because you have power over men. But you must use men, not let them use you. You must be a master, not a slave. Look here – Nietzsche says, `All life, no matter how we idealize it, is nothing more nor less than exploitation.’ That’s what I’m telling you. Exploit yourself. Go to some big city where you will find opportunities! Use men! Be strong! Defiant! Use men to get the things you want!”

“Allen is a profoundly philosophical comedian,” writes Vittorio Hosle, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame.

“Philosophers love Woody Allen, in part, because he writes us into his movies,” adds Tom Morris in “Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong?”

Nietzsche is not good for us, in the classroom or at the cinema, objects the late University of Chicago prof Allan Bloom

“Woody Allen helps to make us feel comfortable with nihilism, to Americanize it,” he writes in his 1987 bestseller “The Closing of the American Mind.” In “How Nietzsche Conquered America” he laments our angst lacks depth: “American nihilism is a mood, a mood of moodiness. … It is nihilism without the abyss.”

Nonetheless, scholars use Nietzsche to interpret pop culture. A chapter in the new book “The Cultural Impact of Kanye West” is titled “When Apollo and Dionysus clash: A Nietzschean perspective on the work of Kanye West.” The author dissects “No Church in the Wild,” a music video by Kanye West and Jay Z.

In the 1930s, American newspapers noted the “Nietzscheanization” of German politics. The Chicago Tribune covered a 1935 lecture on the trend at the Stevens Hotel. “Nazis’ Prophet in War on Christ” read a headline identifying the philosopher infamous for proclaiming “God is dead.” “A new religion is evolving in the world today to compete with Christianity, and Friedrich Nietzsche … was its chief prophet.” The Presbyterian lecturer warned: “If Christianity fails, science will fall; democracy will fall.”

Nietzche’s prose was repurposed for the nuptials of National Socialists. “Pagan Customs Revived for Nazi Weddings: Blood Purity Is Stressed” headlined a Berlin dispatch the Chicago Tribune ran in 1938.

In World War I German soldiers took a special edition of the philosopher’s work into battle, as did their comrades in World War II. “How do you know Nietzsche’s my hero?” asks a young Adolph Hitler (Noah Taylor) in the film “Max.”

“Once more Nietzsche’s name, as in 1914, is in the news,” wrote a Harvard historian in 1940. In 1943 the New York Times reported that Hitler’s 60th birthday gift to Mussolini was “a bound edition of the complete works of Nietzsche.”

Other editions were at risk in Roland Emmerich’s “The Day After Tomorrow,” a near-future disaster film about global freezing. Refugees in the New York Public Library stay alive by burning books. Unlike the Nazis, heat, not hate, is their reason. “Friedrich Nietzsche! We cannot burn Friedrich Nietzsche; he was the most important thinker of 19th Century!” exclaims one frigid admirer.