Live from La Farine: Yes, Woody Allen is a sexual predator. And because all of his art is about him, that turns it into toxic sludge. Why do you ask?
I had always thought that if Woody Allen was that kind of a sexual predator, I would more likely than not someday hear something through the St. Louis branch of my family coming from my mother's second cousin Mariel Hemingway.
Lo and behold, now I have:
...On some level, I will always feel drawn to it.... Knowing the truth about what you believe and longing for the time before you knew it are not mutually exclusive states of being. That is how I, and I’m sure many others, have long approached ‘Manhattan,’ since I became aware of the allegations of sexual abuse against Woody Allen and started seeing the film’s April-December ‘romance’ in the stark and unforgiving light which it deserves. To love that film as an adult is to embrace a willful innocence about art, business and life that none of us can really afford to begin with. Mariel Hemingway was 17 when she played the teenage girlfriend of Woody Allen, then 44, in the film he wrote, directed and starred in. It’s considered one of his finest pieces of work.... It is witty, lovingly shot, and in so many ways a frank and unflinching indictment of conflicted male desire....
Blah, blah, blah your conflicted male desire.
If you had asked me at 17 if I would ever date a 44-year old, I might have actually barfed. If you had asked me at 19 if I thought there was anything disgusting about Tracy and Isaac’s relationship in ‘Manhattan,’ I would have said something like, well, it’s not real life, is it? It’s a story. And to make great literature and film and drama, we have to create spaces of empathy for characters who make poor choices....
Woody Allen is a cultural blind spot for us, an artist of incomparable influence whose work has purchased him forgiveness from a public he spent his entire artistic career grooming to forgive men like him....
[Mariel] Hemingway... says she knew he had a crush on her, but she dismissed it as:
the kind of thing that seemed to happen any time middle-aged men got around young women,
because we have groomed our young women to expect this kind of attention, and to tolerate it.... [He] tried to convince her--still just 18 at the time--to come to Paris with him on what was clearly going to be a lovers’ vacation, even her parents encouraged her to go. At 18... charged with being the sole level-headed adult... she put the brakes on the entire plan:
I wanted them to put their foot down. They didn’t. They kept lightly encouraging me.... [Waking]...with the certain knowledge that I was an idiot. No one was going to get their own room. His plan, such as it was, involved being with me.
She shot him down....
The debate over whether or not we can separate a work of art from the flawed human being who created it isn’t... solvable.... Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old and still eludes justice, and he is celebrated as a genius filmmaker by the industry and by his fans, as if he is a character in one of his own movies that, in order to appreciate, we must extend a certain amount of empathy to its monstrous main character....
Woody Allen was Isaac, and quite possibly still is. Thankfully for her, Mariel Hemingway was not Tracy.... There are still many people who don’t believe Dylan Farrow when she says Allen sexually abused her as a child. The scandal over Allen’s affair with and subsequent marriage to his ex-partner Mia Farrow’s daughter Soon Yi Previn has long since subsided into a ‘well, it seems to be working out for them’ shrug.... Woody Allen is a genius. Woody Allen is a predator. He put those two sides of himself together, hand in hand, and dared us to applaud. And we did...