By A.O.Scott, On Second Thought, Movies, Feb. 1, 2018<\/p>\n
On the morning of the Oscar nominations, I was chatting with a stranger about movies, as one does. The conversation turned to Woody Allen. \u201cMy son has seen all his movies, and he thinks he\u2019s innocent,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve seen all his movies, and I think he\u2019s guilty,\u201d I said. There was not much else to say.<\/p>\n
There is a lot more to say. The words we chose weren\u2019t quite the right ones. 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\u2019s not just a matter of whether you believe Dylan Farrow\u2019s accusation of sexual abuse \u2014 reiterated a few weeks ago in a television <\/a>interview<\/a> \u2014 or the denial from her father, Mr. Allen. It\u2019s also a matter of who deserves the benefit of the doubt.<\/p>\n The charge that Mr. Allen molested Dylan Farrow surfaced in 1992, in the wake of his breakup with Mia Farrow. That rupture was caused by Mia Farrow\u2019s discovery that Mr. Allen was sexually involved with Soon-Yi Previn, who was her adopted daughter, though not Mr. Allen\u2019s. His defenders (including his and Mia Farrow\u2019s adopted son Moses) suggest that the allegation of abuse was the invention of a spurned woman lashing out against the man who had humiliated her.<\/p>\n The severity of that accusation, and Mr. Allen\u2019s steadfast denial of it, had the curious effect of neutralizing what might otherwise have been a reputation-destroying scandal. \u201cThe heart wants what it wants,\u201d<\/a> he famously said, and what his 56-year-old heart desired was a 21-year-old woman he had known since she was a child. He married her, kept making movies, and the whole business faded into tabloid memory.<\/p>\n I remember the debating points vividly, which is to say I remember invoking them in arguments with friends at the time. Ms. Previn was not a minor. Mr. Allen and her mother had never lived together. He was not Soon-Yi\u2019s father, or even her stepfather, even if he was the father of her half-siblings. And besides, Mr. Allen\u2019s love life was personal, and therefore irrelevant. What mattered was the work.<\/p>\n For more than two decades, Mr. Allen\u2019s credibility as an artist was undiminished. The reception of his movies fluctuated, but critics (myself included) often enough found reason to hail a return to form after a fallow period. He won awards, and actors clamored for the chance to appear in his films. Only now has that started to change.<\/p>\n The old defenses are being trotted out again. Like much else that used to sound like common sense, they have a tinny, clueless ring in present circumstances. The separation of art and artist is proclaimed \u2014 rather desperately, it seems to me \u2014 as if it were a philosophical principle, rather than a cultural habit buttressed by shopworn academic dogma. But the notion that art belongs to a zone of human experience somehow distinct from other human experiences is both conceptually incoherent and intellectually crippling. Art belongs to life, and anyone \u2014 critic, creator or fan \u2014 who has devoted his or her life to art knows as much.<\/p>\n Furthermore, Mr. Allen\u2019s art in particular is saturated with his personality, his preoccupations, his biography and his tastes. One of the most powerful illusions encouraged by popular art is that its creators are people the rest of us know. This is not only because tales of their childhoods and news of their marriages and divorces feed our prurient appetites, or because we can peek into their lives on Instagram and Twitter. It\u2019s also because they carry intimate baggage into their work and invite us to sort through the contents.<\/p>\n Whether you celebrate its authenticity or hate the TMI-ness of it all, this is unquestionably an age of self-display. And one of its founding fathers, without a doubt, is Woody Allen, the neurotic Narcissus of the Me Generation, the bridge between midcentury psychoanalysis and digital-era selfie culture.<\/p>\n Casting him aside will therefore not be so easy, which is part of what I was trying to say in that brief, stalemated discussion about his guilt or innocence. I could, I suppose, declare that I won\u2019t watch any more of his movies. But I can hardly unwatch the ones I\u2019ve seen, which is all of them, at least half more than once. And even if I could, by some feat of cinephilic sophistry, separate those movies from Mr. Allen\u2019s life, I can\u2019t possibly separate them from mine.<\/p>\n When I was young \u2014 much too young, but it\u2019s too late now \u2014 my grandmother took me to see \u201cPlay It Again, Sam.\u201d Most of the jokes went over my head, but a lot of them stuck in it anyway. \u201cDid you hear another Oakland girl got raped?\u201d Diane Keaton asks. \u201cBut I was nowhere near Oakland!\u201d says Mr. Allen, who is playing a San Francisco film critic named Allan Felix. (\u201cPlay It Again, Sam,\u201d released in 1972, is a bit of an outlier in the early Allen canon. It was based on Mr. Allen\u2019s play but directed by Herbert Ross.)<\/p>\n Allan is sometimes visited by the specter of Humphrey Bogart, in trench coat and fedora. He has hard-boiled advice about \u201cdames\u201d and other matters. I had only the vaguest idea of who this apparition was supposed to be, but before long what Bogey was to Allan Felix, Woody Allen was for me. A mentor. A culture hero. A masculine ideal.<\/p>\n He sparked my interest in foreign films and old movies, in jazz and Russian literature, in Franz Kafka and Marshall McLuhan. Whenever there was a revival of \u201cSleeper,\u201d \u201cBananas\u201d or \u201cLove and Death\u201d in those pre-home-video days, I was there. My paperback copies of his first two collections, \u201cGetting Even\u201d and \u201cWithout Feathers,\u201d were dog-eared from endless rereading. No present was ever as keenly coveted or quickly devoured as the hardcover of his third, \u201cSide Effects,\u201d which my parents gave me one Christmas. Mr. Allen\u2019s prose made an even stronger impression on me than his films. His characteristic deflationary swerve from the lofty to the absurd, from high seriousness to utter banality, struck me as the very definition of funny.<\/p>\n The man himself was a plausible definition of sexy. The achievement of his early movies, culminating in \u201cAnnie Hall\u201d (his seventh feature as a director) was to turn a scrawny, bookish, self-conscious nebbish into a player. His subsequent achievement was to turn himself into a serious filmmaker without surrendering that initial cachet. The Allen character in his various incarnations might be insecure, childishly silly, socially hapless (or all of the above), but he was never single for long. The aspects of his temperament held up for mockery \u2014 the hyper-intellectualism, the snobbery, the irreducible Jewishness \u2014 doubled as weapons of seduction. His self-deprecation was a tactic, a feint, a rope-a-dope, and he was plagued less by the frustration of his desires than by their fulfillment. As soon as the heart got what it wanted, it wanted something else. What impressionable, heterosexual, unathletic adolescent boy would not want a piece of that action?<\/p>\n O.K., fine. Not all adolescent males. But underneath the neurosis and the shrugging, stammering self-directed put-downs was a powerful sense of entitlement. The Woody Allen figure in a Woody Allen movie is almost always in transit from one woman to another, impelled by a dialectic of enchantment, disappointment and reawakened desire. The rejected women appear shrewish, needy, shallow or boring. Their replacements, at least temporarily, are earnest, sensuous, generous and, more often than not, younger and less worldly than their predecessors. For a very long time, this was taken not as a self-serving fantasy but as a token of honesty, or freedom from sentimental conceptions of domestic love.<\/p>\n