Woody Allen is far from conventional—which is precisely why he is one of my favorite film directors. Allen has us huddled around the more technologically advanced campfire, the radio, listening to the nostalgic stories that characterized his childhood. Furthermore, he links every episode that occurs throughout the film to the radio, essentially creating an enormous and complete compound family. Much like the extended family we saw in Goodfellas (1991), Radio Days (1987) creates a communal family of listeners, unified in their pastime and subject to the same influence of their radio-listening neighbors. The ethnic family we were presented with in Goodfellas was certainly more centralized and functioned towards a certain end. In Radio Days, Allen presents us with two ethnic families—the central, nuclear family, that clearly takes on a Jewish-American identity, and the communal family that share in the radio broadcastings. The latter conglomerate is awfully diverse, as various scenes throughout the movie use successive shots to illustrate the many different people listening in on the radio.
The progressive tide of the nation, as it proceeds through history, is captured through the workings of the radio, as related by the omnipotent voice-over narrator, Allen himself. His narration is certainly necessary for the film, and serves as the authority that advances the movie from scene to scene, while also linking together discontinuous portions of the various subplots. The main family, of which Woody belongs to, revolves around the radio. Although the film certainly is biased toward illustrating the importance of the radio, it is astounding to count the number of scenes that are introduced as a result of something heard on the radio, or a motive with links to the radio. Certainly, the character Woody that functions within the realm of the motion picture—his life revolves around the various superhero programs, news reports, even holiday greetings that emanate from the voice box. Each and every character’s life is somehow affected by the radio, from Woody’s creative daydream that his parents belonged on a radio show for couples, to Bea’s obsession with marriage that is characterized by her obsessive dancing (to tunes from the radio), to Abe’s heart attack, brought on as holy retribution for his sin of eating food on Yom Kipper, which resulted from a visit next door to quiet the raucous of the neighboring radio.
While the identity of the nuclear family is well defined through memories linked to the radio, the identity of the nation was likewise defined. The radio united all Americans under its voice—those who listened in for news, radio shows, or simply to celebrate the New Year. The concluding scene, in which the story of a girl trapped in a well interrupted scheduled broadcasting to air live to all American, and the gripping, dedicated response of the listeners, only serves to reinforce the fact that the radio had a unifying effect, much like ethnicity does on the other urban groups we’ve studied this year.
