Nanny Dearest

Woody Allen’s piece from Mere Anarchy references the smoky voiced narration of noir detective films and stories, notably of Sam Spade. The sarcasm is apparent from the opening lines that quote the radio program “The Shadow”. This was a program that little boys listened to and emulated in Cold War imaginations. He follows this with the language of the obsessively educated and excessively insecure. This language, which speaks of “crepuscular winter light of my progenitor’s gloomy digs” and is also a noir reference, not just a characterization of snobby Park Avenue types. By mixing words like “digs” with words that made me roll my eyes and keep a dictionary handy, Allen calls up the images of people stuck in seedy underbellies of society while mixing with the upper classes- gangsters, bored wayward women who get themselves in trouble, and people who run the back room politics of high society. “The woman’s usually steady timbre jiggled like quantum particles, and I could tell that she had gone back on smokes” shows that these people know about physics enough to toss it around in witticisms, but still have not cleansed themselves from the infamous smoke-filled rooms. He barely avoids calling his wife a broad or a dame when he mentions that he got a call from “the better half”- at one dehumanizing and ostensibly praising her, later, she takes it further and calls him ‘sugar’ and ‘lover boy’. (Which induces a shiver in some readers if their mental image is still of Woody Allen himself.) The juxtaposition of low dialogue, the silliness of nannies named after cheese products and French maids doing just what we think French maids do, and the distance-producing narrative filled with obscure references of the expository history of what came before, all add to the high-drama style of a detective story, and even ends with a murder gone awry. Yet Allen really does no detective work here, no back alleys are patrolled and no one turns out to be a dirty double crosser. Here, the style tells the story more than the story is able to, and indeed tells a different one, perhaps making up for the lack of substance in the actual events themselves.