Chapter 1

Our framework for analyzing Match Point as a case study of the artistic process should engage, especially how we identify the influence of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Macbeth. Woody Allen’s use of an antihero in this film is starkly different from his typical neurotic, New Yorker types grappling with existential dread.

In Match Point, Chris Wilton’s journey is an embodiment of the anti-hero, a character who operates beyond conventional morality, much like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Both characters wrestle with guilt after committing a crime, yet Chris diverges in that he manages to escape justice, which defies the tragic outcome typical of both Dostoevsky and Macbeth’s tragic arcs.

Allen stripping away the usual neurotic humor, creating a more nihilistic and morally ambiguous atmosphere, feels like an acknowledgment of the inescapable forces of fate that both Macbeth and Crime and Punishment explore. It’s fascinating how you position Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Marx as the ciphers bridging these experiences of humanity and divinity into art. Allen’s engagement with Dostoevsky does feel like his attempt to step into more philosophical, darker territory, which is why Match Point stands out so dramatically from his other films. The absence of the usual Allen neurotic dialogue further emphasizes this departure—transforming the film into a meditation on luck, fate, and moral ambiguity, rather than on existential worry.

We’re going to study Woody Allen’s Match Point as a case study of the artistic process. So the artistic process has one, two, and three steps. The first step is our experiences with animals, with man, and with God, or with several gods. Those are our experiences. Then, to create art, we’ve got to do the second step, which is transcendent.

Transform those experiences with animals, man, and God into emotional arcs, tragic eternal recurrences, and narrative arcs. So we’ve got to create, respectively, an antihero, a tragic hero, and a classic hero. So the third is the bridge between… How do we bridge our experiences with animals, with man, and with gods into these arcs, emotional, tragic, and narrative?

So the bridge is our ciphers. That is our examples. That’s Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. They are the stereotypical bridge for any high-minded person, for these three archetypes. And so Woody Allen, in this case, chooses Dostoevsky, and specifically crime and punishment. Crime and punishment is a framework with which to write a movie, and he writes Match Point. And this movie stands out from his filmography.

I mean, he has over 50 movies, but it’s the least Woody Allen-feeling movie. It’s brilliantly done. None of thw neurotic nerds, New Yorker nerds talking about any existential issues. That’s all Nietzsche. None of that.

Of course, Woody Allen had a Karl Marx-style revolutionary in Bananas, which was just a farce, one of his early movies. But he generally doesn’t create any heroic characters. They’re usually existential, angst-driven characters.

From this point of view, Match Point is a revolution. It’s a very stand-out antihero in Woody’s filmography, because he was under the influence of Dostoevsky. Without a doubt, there was some influence, too, of Macbeth.