Woody Allen’s Work Through Fresh Eyes
Innocence and guilt are legal (and also metaphysical) standards, but when we talk about the behavior of artists and our feelings about them, we are inevitably dealing with much messier, murkier, subjective issues.
It’s not just a matter of whether you believe Dylan Farrow’s accusation of sexual abuse — reiterated recently in a television interview — or the denial from her father, Woody Allen. It’s also a matter of who deserves the benefit of the doubt.
The charge that Mr. Allen molested Ms. Farrow surfaced in 1992, in the wake of his breakup with Mia Farrow. That rupture was caused by Mia Farrow’s discovery that Mr. Allen was sexually involved with Soon-Yi Previn, who was her adopted daughter, though not Mr. Allen’s. His defenders suggest that the allegation of abuse was the invention of a spurned woman lashing out against the man who had humiliated her.
The severity of that accusation, and Mr. Allen’s steadfast denial of it, had the curious effect of neutralizing what might otherwise have been a reputation- destroying scandal.
“The heart wants what it wants,” he said. What his 56-year- old heart desired was a 21-yearold woman he had known since she was a child. He married Ms. Previn, kept making movies, and the whole business faded into memory.
For more than two decades, Mr. Allen’s credibility as an artist was undiminished. He won awards, and actors clamored to appear in his films. Only now has that started to change. The old defenses are being trotted out again. Like much else that used to sound like common sense, they have a tinny, clueless ring now.
The separation of art and artist is proclaimed as if it were a philosophical principle. But the notion that art belongs to a zone of human experience distinct from other experiences is conceptually incoherent and intellectually crippling. Furthermore, Mr. Allen’s art is saturated with his personality, his preoccupations, his biography and his tastes.
When I was young, my grandmother took me to see “Play It Again, Sam.” Most of the jokes went over my head, but a lot of them stuck in it anyway. “Did you hear another Oakland girl got raped?” Diane Keaton asks. “But I was nowhere near Oakland!” says Mr. Allen, who is portraying a film critic named Allan Felix.
For me, Mr. Allen became a men- tor, a culture hero and a masculine ideal. Whenever there was a revival of “Sleeper,” “Bananas” or “Love and Death,” I was there. His prose made an even stronger impression. My copies of his first two collections, “Getting Even” and “Without Feathers,” were dog- eared. His third, “Side Effects,” was quickly devoured.
The man himself was a plausible definition of sexy. The achievement of his early movies, culminating in “Annie Hall,” was to turn a scrawny, bookish, self- conscious nebbish into a player. His subsequent achievement was to turn himself into a serious filmmaker. The Allen character might be insecure, childishly silly or socially hapless, but he was never single for long.
He was plagued less by the frustration of his desires than by their fulfillment. Underneath the neurosis and the stammering self-directed put-downs was a powerful sense of entitlement.
A recent Washington Post article dug deep into the archive of his unpublished writings and found ample signs of his preoccupation with very young women, something moviegoers have been aware of since “Manhattan,” in which Mariel Hemingway played his earnest younger love interest.
What I find most ethically troubling about his work at present is the extent to which I and so many of my colleagues have ignored or minimized its uglier aspects. A sensibility that seemed sweet, skeptical and self-scrutinizing may have been cruel, cynical and self-justifying all along.
Mr. Allen’s films and writings inform the memories and experiences of a great many people. I don’t mean this as a defense, but an acknowledgment of betrayal and shame.
I will not blame you if you want to stop watching his movies. But I also think some of us have to start all over again.
The pitfalls of separating the art from the artist.