"He was the phenomenon of the twenties. When you think about it, he was as well known as Lindbergh. It's really quite astonishing." — Susan Sontag

This essay traces the ideas of several major twentieth-century cultural theorists through Woody Allen's Zelig. These include Mikhail Bakhtin, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and Giorgio Agamben. In this fictional documentary, Allen rewrites the pre-Second World War history of the United States around Leonard Zelig, whose mysterious existence exposes some of the central tensions of American society in the 1920s and 1930s: the construction of the Other; the triangular relationship among the psychotic or neurotic individual, society, and psychoanalysis; the national discourses of the period; and the rise of popular culture through radio, cinema, advertising, and the press. I will follow the metamorphosis of Leonard Zelig and, finally, relate his individual psychosis to a broader social one.

Who Is Zelig? Why Should Anyone Care?

"Though the shows and parties keep Zelig's sister and her lover rich and amused, Zelig's own existence is a nonexistence. Devoid of personality, his human qualities long since lost in the shuffle of life, he sits alone, quietly staring into space: a cipher, a nonperson, a performing freak."

As Susan Sontag says at the beginning of the documentary, Zelig was the phenomenon of the twenties. The American literary and social critic Irving Howe claims that Zelig's story reflects both the nature of civilization and the character of the period. For Saul Bellow, Zelig was amusing but also touched a nerve in people in a way they might have preferred to avoid. These three commentators make a common point: the significance of Zelig lies in his relationship to civilization itself.

The narrator takes us back to 1928 and a party at a Long Island estate, attended by socialites, patrons of the arts, politicians, poets, and other members of high society. Among them is F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose work came to define the Jazz Age and the so-called Lost Generation. In his notes, Fitzgerald describes a curious man named Leon Selwyn, or Zelman, who speaks in an upper-class Boston accent, praises the wealthy, and appears to be an aristocrat and an ardent Republican. An hour later, Fitzgerald is stunned to see the same man speaking to the kitchen staff in a coarse accent and claiming to be a Democrat.

A year later, the same person is spotted among the players at a New York Yankees training session. In Chicago, a waiter named Calvin Turner notices the stranger at a private party; moments later, the man seems to have become a Black musician in the orchestra. Several months afterwards, the New York police investigate the disappearance of a clerk named Leonard Zelig. He is eventually found in Chinatown displaying what the film calls "Oriental" features and is immediately taken to Manhattan Hospital. On the way there, he changes from Chinese to Caucasian.

At the hospital, Dr. Eudora Fletcher, a psychiatrist, begins to investigate the mystery. In her presence, Zelig becomes a psychiatrist himself—a remarkably confident one—claiming to have written several psychoanalytic papers and to have worked with Sigmund Freud in Vienna. He says that they disagreed over the concept of penis envy because Zelig believed it should not be limited to women. While under examination, he continues to wander across the country, speaking French among French people and adopting other identities according to his surroundings. Dr. Alan Sindell calls him "the scientific phenomenon of the age, and possibly of all time." The medical experiments intensify, although Dr. Fletcher argues that Zelig's condition is psychological rather than physiological.

While skeptical doctors reject Fletcher's interpretation, Zelig has already become a popular sensation. Advertisements, newsreels, and newspapers celebrate the "Human Chameleon." Former New York Daily Mirror editors Mike Geibell and Ted Bierbauer admit that, in those days, they would do almost anything to sell papers, including exaggerating stories. Yet Zelig, they insist, was different: the story required no exaggeration. His strange reality was enough to make people buy newspapers.

Zelig is eventually removed from the hospital and placed in the care of his half-sister. She and her lover arrange exhibition tours across the United States and Europe, turning his illness into a profitable spectacle. After they die in Spain, Zelig disappears. When he is found again, Dr. Fletcher begins the "White Room Sessions," during which she treats him through psychotherapy.

The sessions reveal that Zelig's constant metamorphosis originates in a childhood experience. Under hypnosis, he recalls a day at school when a classmate asked whether he had read Moby-Dick. Because everyone else in the class had read it, Zelig claimed that he had too. Dr. Fletcher concludes that he adapts to his environment because he fears alienation from those around him. Zelig himself explains that transformation makes him feel safe.

The alienated Zelig is therefore a deeply Kafkaesque character. Allen's films repeatedly return to psychoanalysis and to Franz Kafka, and Zelig makes the connection especially productive. Gregor Samsa may truly have been transformed into an insect, but Kafka also leaves open the possibility that the transformation belongs to Samsa's experience of himself. The blurred boundary between insecthood and humanity in The Metamorphosis resembles Zelig's uncertain position between what the press describes as reptilian existence and ordinary human life.

Yet Zelig differs from Samsa in one important respect. Once he becomes a social phenomenon, he demands recognition, meaning, and some form of intelligibility. His existence remains ambivalent, a term central to Bakhtin's account of the grotesque. For Bakhtin, the grotesque image represents an unfinished metamorphosis: death and birth, growth and becoming. It is frightening and humorous at once, suspended between the real and the imaginary.

Zelig similarly becomes a grotesque image whose form cannot be stabilized within everyday reality. The grotesque produces not only ambivalence but also the sense of a transformation that never reaches completion. This may be the crucial difference between Gregor Samsa and Leonard Zelig. Samsa's metamorphosis can be interpreted within the literary text either as the experience of a psychotic human being or as the condition of a former human being who has become an insect. Zelig, by contrast, remains human, while his unfinished transformations are debated by society and by medical authorities. The constant effort to define this grotesque phenomenon of the twenties is also a distinctly Enlightenment procedure in the sense developed by Adorno and Horkheimer.

Dialectic of Enlightenment, written by Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer and first published in 1944, appeared sixteen years after Zelig supposedly emerged as a social phenomenon. Adorno and Horkheimer could have treated the Zelig case as an illustration of Enlightenment rationality—had Zelig existed. We may nevertheless read Allen's fictional case as if it had been devised to illuminate Enlightenment as a process of demythologization and disenchantment.

For Adorno and Horkheimer, modern knowledge presents itself as a liberation from mythology and blind belief. It seeks to disenchant magical representations of the world and regards transcendent meaning with suspicion. What cannot be specified, measured, and made intelligible is rejected. Thought is confined to immanence: to the limits of possible experience and knowledge. Enlightenment therefore tries to contain everything within its categories, while whatever falls outside those limits is dismissed as myth. This logic includes not only positivism but also empiricism: an exclusive emphasis on what can be sensed directly, quantified, and systematized—precisely the methods that several psychiatrists apply to Zelig.

Because his existence is unidentified, unknowable, and apparently magical, Zelig becomes the object of positivist and empiricist attention. Scientists approach his metamorphosis as a problem to be converted into an intelligible sign. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer also invoke the concept of the sign, even though they were not structuralists. In their account, representation begins in repetition and eventually becomes a system of equivalence. Like money or numbers, the sign assigns a function whose value does not depend on the material properties of the object itself.

The image, in this account, belongs to magic and mimetic participation, while the sign belongs to rational knowledge. One either gives up being part of nature in order to know it scientifically, or retains the mimetic relation at the cost of scientific mastery. This is the dialectic they identify. In modern bourgeois society, art is confined to an autonomous aesthetic sphere, separated from technology and practical reality, while science becomes knowledge purchased at the cost of alienation from nature. Zelig is therefore deciphered not only in the name of disenchantment but also in the pursuit of mastery—a pursuit through which Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer argue, threatens to revert into myth.

Zelig: One of Us? How So?

"Kids, you've got to be yourselves. Don't act like anybody else because you think they have all the answers. Be your own man. Speak up and say what's on your mind. Maybe they can't do that in foreign countries, but that's the American way. I used to be a member of the reptile family, but I'm not anymore." — Leonard Zelig

"Chameleon Cured by Woman Doctor!" announce the newspapers before Zelig is presented with the symbolic keys to New York City. During psychotherapy, Dr. Fletcher imitates Leonard Zelig, forcing him to confront a mirror image of his own behavior. Zelig can no longer adapt simply by becoming the other person; confronted with himself, he falls into an apparent emptiness of character. Through psychoanalytic transference, he gradually begins to formulate opinions of his own. His first declaration is that he wants to have sex with Dr. Fletcher.

Despite his "normalization," Zelig loses none of his popularity. He sells his life story to Hollywood and appears alongside celebrities including William Randolph Hearst, Marie Dressler, Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin, Jimmy Walker, Adolphe Menjou, Claire Windsor, Dolores del Río, James Cagney, Carole Lombard, and Bobby Jones. Historian John Morton Blum interprets Zelig's advice about self-respect as meaningful to American audiences. During the Great Depression, he suggests, Zelig became a symbol of self-improvement—a reading with which Sontag agrees.

This celebration collapses shortly before Zelig and Dr. Fletcher plan to marry. Women from across the United States claim that Zelig fathered their children and then disappeared. The former model citizen is transformed into a criminal and charged with an absurd catalogue of unresolved offenses: bigamy, adultery, automobile accidents, plagiarism, damage to homes, and unnecessary dental extractions. He is later reported to have turned Greek while eating in a Greek restaurant. Then he disappears, only to be spotted months later among the Nazi leadership. Saul Bellow remarks that fascism offered Zelig an opportunity to dissolve his identity into the anonymity of a vast movement.

This part of the documentary stages two contrary transformations. First, Zelig is cured by Dr. Fletcher; later, his condition returns when he joins the Nazis. Before his recovery, he occupies the boundary between the social subject—the normal and useful citizen—and the mythical, mysterious, or unidentifiable being who is not granted a stable human identity. Two practices eventually make him intelligible: scientific investigation and the circulation of speech within mass society.

Scientific research, in Adorno and Horkheimer's sense, attempts to absorb Zelig into existing positivist and empiricist categories. It is an Enlightenment project of classification. At the same time, songs, films, toys, games, advertisements, conversations, and newspaper stories continue to authenticate Zelig outside the limits of scientific knowledge. Together they evoke a mimetic conception of language and, more specifically, discourse as utterance.

An utterance is not merely an instrument for communicating information. It is a situated use of language, produced by particular subjects and received by others under specific historical conditions. Bakhtin's concepts of dialogue and polyphony remind us that every word carries the history of its previous uses. Foucault's understanding of discourse, meanwhile, emphasizes the ways in which language is organized, regulated, regulating, and constitutive. Discourse helps determine who a person can be and how that person understands themself.

Zelig, as a human being in constant transformation, has long since been emptied of stable self-perception. His personality adheres to the utterances and gestures of those around him. He mimics not only bodies but also acts of language: an upper-class Boston accent among socialites, a coarse accent among servants, one political position in one room and its opposite in another. From this perspective, discourse continuously organizes and constitutes Zelig. The Human Chameleon becomes a symbolic example of discourse working at its limit. Even after his normalization, he has merely changed from a "nonexistent performing freak" into an "existing performing freak," whose newly formed personality is still built from earlier utterances:

"I used to be a member of the reptile family, but I'm not anymore."

In a December 2007 interview with the Turkish film magazine Altyazi, Slavoj Zizek—sometimes described as "the Elvis of cultural theory"—said that he had not seen Annie Hall but had seen Zelig. Zizek might interpret Leonard Zelig as a figure of the Lacanian Real and the repeated attempts to identify him as efforts to reintroduce him into the Symbolic order. Before turning to Zizek's idea of revolution, however, two questions arise from the theoretical framework in which this essay was first conceived: How might Judith Butler read Zelig's body? Could he be understood as a materialized body, a constitutive outside, or an abject figure? And could he be compared to Agamben's figure of the Muselmann—or does such a comparison reveal its own limit?

Butler develops the concept of abjection through a critique of the language of construction. The question "Who constructs?" can mislead us by presuming that construction must originate in a prior and sovereign subject. If subjects themselves emerge within networks of power, construction cannot be understood as a single act performed by an already formed agent. Butler instead describes a network of regulatory practices through which bodies, sexualities, and identities are materialized.

This process is performative: it works through citation and reiteration. Butler therefore speaks of the materialization of bodies rather than simply their construction. For certain bodies to appear coherent and recognizable, others must be excluded as unknowable, meaningless, or unintelligible. These excluded bodies form the constitutive outside of intelligible identity. Butlerian performativity thus connects with the Foucauldian reading developed above: utterance functions as discourse by repeatedly producing the categories through which bodies can be known. Zelig's unstable, medically scrutinized, and endlessly represented body can consequently be read as a materialized body located at the constitutive outside of normal identity.

Abjection, in this account, refers to the exclusion of bodies that cannot be admitted into prevailing codes of intelligibility. Agamben's discussion of the Muselmann concerns an extreme and historically specific figure produced within the Nazi concentration camp: a person forced toward the threshold between humanity and nonhumanity, life and death. Zelig, a Jewish man who is absurdly shown among Nazi officials, also appears at a boundary of recognizability. But the resemblance must not become an equivalence. Zelig's condition is not the product of the camp system, and the film's grotesque fiction does not carry the historical experience of terror and death condensed in Agamben's figure.

Zelig is therefore not a Muselmann. His peculiar existence does not represent the terminal consequence of biopower that Agamben seeks to describe. He is better understood, within the terms of this essay, as a Butlerian abject figure: an individual whose unstable materialization is neither tolerated nor accepted and who is consequently turned into a social scapegoat.

Butler and Zizek Whisper That Zelig Is the One, While Adorno Blesses Woody Allen from Heaven

"I've never flown before in my life, and it shows exactly what you can do if you're a total psychotic." — Leonard Zelig

Zelig passes through three major stages. The first is his path toward normalization, which I have discussed through Bakhtin and through Adorno and Horkheimer. The second is his period of supposedly normal existence, interpreted through Foucault and Butler. The third begins with his relapse and culminates in his heroic return to the United States after escaping Nazi Germany.

In the documentary, Oswald Pohl, a former high-ranking SS official, claims that Hitler was furious about Zelig's escape, while Zelig himself is welcomed by an enormous crowd in New York City. Saul Bellow identifies the paradox: the ability that makes this extraordinary feat possible is the same condition previously treated as an illness. Zelig's sickness lies at the root of his salvation. Having once urged people to be no one but themselves, he now tells them what can be achieved by becoming "a total psychotic," and the crowd responds with enthusiastic applause.

This reversal raises two final questions. What might Adorno, an admirer of Kafka, have thought of Zelig as a film? And would Butler and Zizek have joined the crowd on "Welcome Zelig Day"?

Adorno and Horkheimer associate the image with mimetic art and the sign with rationalized knowledge in modern society. Adorno's broader aesthetics searches for forms of autonomous or authentic art capable of preserving a critical relation to social reality rather than merely reproducing it. Such art does not simply reconcile magic and knowledge, but keeps their tension alive. It is avant-garde, anti-realist, and resistant to established hierarchies. Kafka is exemplary because his work refuses the smooth coherence of ordinary reality and makes social domination perceptible through formal estrangement.

Throughout this essay, I have interpreted Zelig with the help of cultural theory while remaining inside Allen's fictional cinematic world. At this point, we can briefly step outside it and encounter Woody Allen as Jean-Luc Godard did in his 1986 short film Meetin' WA. In Zelig, Allen constructs Leonard Zelig inside a meticulously reconstructed historical period. He uses cinema's technologies of cutting, editing, reenactment, archival footage, and visual manipulation to create an alternative reality in which Zelig appears to have existed.

By placing contemporary intellectuals such as Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Bruno Bettelheim, and John Morton Blum before the camera, Allen further persuades viewers to accept the fictional archive. Their authority functions like documentary evidence, even as the film quietly exposes the mechanisms through which evidence and historical truth are produced. Zelig is therefore an avant-garde mockumentary as well as a satire. It encourages the audience to remain critical of the social institutions of the United States in the 1920s and 1930s while continually disturbing the line between archival fact and cinematic invention.

In this sense, Allen merits a version of the praise Adorno gave to Kafka. Zelig holds image and sign, magic and knowledge, in productive tension. Through its formal construction, it transforms an individual psychoanalytic condition—psychosis—into a possible principle of social behavior.

This essay has read Zelig as a Bakhtinian grotesque; as an element of myth and magic subjected to the classifications of Enlightenment in Adorno and Horkheimer's account; as a fictional individual upon whom Foucauldian discourse operates with unusual clarity; and as a Butlerian abject figure, but not an Agambenian Muselmann. Two questions remain: Butlerian resistance and Zizekian revolution.

At the end of the documentary, Zelig's declaration of his psychosis becomes the climax of his life story and can be read as an act of provocation. Zizek often describes revolutionary action as an intervention of the Lacanian Real that disturbs the coordinates of the Symbolic order. Zelig's public embrace of the very condition society had tried to cure—and the crowd's admiration for it—may be interpreted as such an intrusion. The Symbolic order that classified psychosis as lack suddenly celebrates it as the source of heroic possibility.

But Butler may offer the more convincing conclusion. To locate abjection entirely within the Lacanian Real risks overlooking its political and ethical possibilities. Because performativity depends on repetition, its norms can never reproduce themselves with perfect stability. Reiteration creates the possibility of variation, appropriation, and resignification. The familiar example is the reclamation of the word queer: a term imposed by heteronormative power becomes a name through which resistance and collective identity can be performed.

Zelig becomes a counter-performer in this sense. By performing his "sickness" at the end, he creates a space in which he can coexist with the rest of society without simply erasing the condition that made him unintelligible. Psychosis no longer remains entirely outside social normativity. After its heroic display, it becomes an object of fascination and even a model of possibility. The condition society once tried to eliminate is recoded as an innovative criterion of citizenship: the blessing—and the satire—of social psychosis.