Poster for “Manhattan,” in which director Woody Allen plays a man in love with a 17-year-old girl (Mariel Hemingway). No one raised any objections to this in 1979 when the movie was released. Today this aspect of the critically acclaimed film raises eyebrows.
The #MeToo movement continues to explode, and we continue to tread gingerly through its landmine-riddled landscape.
The New York Times skewers Alec Baldwin for satirizing P-Grabber in Chief Donald J. Trump while defending filmmakers Woody Allen and James Toback, both accused of sexual abuses. Actress/author Rose McGowan – who’s been fiercely outspoken in her accusations of film producer Harvey Weinstein raping her – cuts off interviewer Christiane Amanpour before she can read a Weinstein response to McGowan’s new book, “Brave.” Museums wonder what their response should be to photographer Chuck Close, who has apologized for sexual harassment.
And yet, a woman friend of mine, a Hillary Clinton supporter whom I consider to be strong on women’s issues, wonders if we’ve gone too far, if we are indeed in the Cromwellian or Robespierre moment of this revolution. My uncle, a Trump Republican, wakes me up early on Saturday morning to take me to task for a sexy article in the February issue of WAG magazine, which I edit, saying it makes a hypocrite of #MeToo. And yet, he’s fine with Randall Margraves, the father of three daughters sexually abused by Dr. Larry Nassar, attempting to attack Nassar in a Michigan courtroom.
We’re all over the place in the #MeToo landscape, in large part because we feel betrayed by people we have loved or at least trusted. It doesn’t matter if we know them personally or if we’ve been actually violated by them. What matters is that we have had some kind of relationship with the abusers. We are employees, in McGowan’s case, or friends, in Baldwin’s. Or we’re fans, as in the case of The New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, who offered an ambivalent analysis of Allen – whom he thinks is guilty of child molestation – that comes across as a kind of, sort of, defense.
I’m fascinated by fandom, in part because I’m such a fan myself – of everything from Alexander the Great to Novak Djokovic – and because fandom figures in the new psychological thriller I’m working on. It deals in part with a CIA agent hot on the trail of a rising Russian tennis star whom he believes to be an assassin. And yet, the tennis-loving agent is such a fan.
How do you – can you – separate the sin from the sinner, as Christianity teaches? Are we prematurely judging others who are supposed to be innocent before proven guilty, or is that a copout against taking a moral stand? It’s tricky and it becomes trickier when we identify with the object of our admiration or adoration. That’s the crux of A. O. Scott’s “Woody Allen problem”:
“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’t watch any more of his movies. But I can hardly unwatch the ones I’ve 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’s life, I can’t possibly separate them from mine.”
Fair enough. As he quotes Allen (from “Hannah and Her Sisters”): “The heart wants what it wants.” It’s what my Allen-loving mother chillingly quoted to me in 1996 as she lay mostly paralyzed in a hospital bed – similar to the one that would be her home for the last 15 years of her life. Or as the 17th-century French author François de la Rochefoucauld opined: “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.”
Listen, I hear you. I’ve known women who were in love with convicted criminals. They’re not the first, and they won’t be the last – particularly in this time of raw emotions. And sometimes, people who do terrible things to others can be wonderful to you. I’ve experienced that as well.
But if we “love the sinner,” we make a mistake in failing to acknowledge the sin as well as that love. Scott’s Allen opus goes to great lengths in parsing – excusing – Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow, his former partner. His love affair with Previn, a woman he had known since she was a child, led to the breakup of the Farrow-Allen relationship and Farrow’s charges that he had molested another of her adopted daughters, Dylan Farrow.
I have no idea if this is true or not. But I do know there’s a reason you don’t defecate where you eat. It tends to muck things up. The former Farrow-Allen family is a mess of alienations and recriminations. Regardless of whether or not he molested Dylan Farrow, what Allen and Previn did to Mia Farrow was wrong, a terrible betrayal.
Allen and Previn remain married. He continues to make movies. There’s no question he’s a brilliant filmmaker. I have fond memories of many of his films and saw part of “Manhattan Murder Mystery” for the first time recently.
“The heart wants what it wants.” But the mind wants what it wants, too. Love what and whom you love. But don’t pretend that bad behavior is anything but.