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Nonfiction Views: Woody or not? Plus the week's notable new nonfiction [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-07
Happy New Year, everyone! I’m back to my Tuesday evening spot. And tonight...
It all started with an offhand comment by bookgirl in her Contemporary Fiction Views diary of December 17th:
Also wondering if I should read the upcoming Woody Allen biography because I think what he has done is abusive and sick. It’s even longer (more than 800 pages) than the Duke of Buckingham bio (nearly 700 pages) that I posted about on my Substack today.
The prospect of this new Woody Allen bio stuck in my head, and as the holiday season finally passed and I was updating my various promotional book lists at my Literate Lizard Online Bookstore, I pondered whether or not I wanted to include the book, coming out February 2nd, on my 20% Off Preorders We’re Excited About list. On the one hand, I think there will be interest in the book, and the offer of a discount can attract sales. On the other hand, the allegations (and considerable evidence of their veracity) of Allen’s “abusive and sick” behavior is a toxic subject that constitutes a line in the sand for many—including for some of my faithful readers of this weekly diary—and to offend them is not something I want to do.
Why am I even interested in the book? Well, the truth is I feel a slender four-movie portion of his lifelong output had a big influence on me: that period of three movies beginning with Annie Hall in 1977, Manhattan in 1979, and ending with Stardust Memories in 1980, plus his return to a character-driven story several movies later with Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986. To my younger self, in my twenties and, by the year of Hannah, just entering my thirties, these movies seemed to me great storytelling, the characters so human, the questions posed about the meaning of life so intriguing, and funny as well, but with the humor woven into the story rather than the jokey style of his earlier movies (Stardust Memories poked fun at this: Allen was a movie director reluctantly attending a film retrospective, where people kept saying they missed his ‘earlier, funny movies.’)
What can I say? I was a kid, practically. I was blown away by Annie Hall. I was in San Francisco during one of my youthful extended Greyhound Bus tours of the country when I saw Manhattan. The movie stirred an intense desire to get back to my East Coast big city world (I was a Philly guy most of my life.) After the movie, I walked the streets of San Francisco all night long in an agitated state, and got on the bus heading back east the next morning. And for a long time, Hannah and Her Sisters was one of my all-time favorite movies; I have watched it more often than any other movie, including twice in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and once in Barranco, Peru.
My wife also admits to being influenced by Woody Allen. She performs stand-up comedy and says his early work in that arena was a big influence. And another small connection. In the scene from near
A scene from Annie Hall, with my wife in a brief walk-on
the end of Annie Hall shown in this picture, that’s Woody Allen coming out of the movie theater alongside a tall woman in a white coat, some actress named Sigourney Weaver in her debut film appearance. Further along from underneath the theater marquee is a couple with a woman in a yellow scarf—my wife! Her earlier acting days in New York, before we met in the 1990s
But really, other than those four movies, I can’t say I was a big Woody Allen fan. I didn’t like his ‘earlier, funny movies.’ The humor was too broad for my taste, and not really character-based. His movies in the period right after the four that I did love were sometimes OK, but none blew me away. Broadway Danny Rose was charming, and Crimes and Misdemeanors had flashes of brilliance, but for the most part they were ordinary. Zelig was technically clever but I found it annoying. And his later movies...mostly dreck, just stilted, repetitive not very funny. Of the over 20 movies he’’s made since 2000, I’ve only seen the beginnings of a handful, and turned them off because they were so insipid. (Although I admit this biography has made me a bit curious about some of them.)
And in truth, with what I know about Allen now, I see those four movies I loved in a different light. There is definitely a domineering, patronizing streak in his treatment of women, and of course the running theme of older men in relationships with young women.
But I was still curious about the book, so I downloaded the PDF of the advance reviewer copy. Interesting to note, the working title presented in the advance copy is Woody Allen: Life and Legacy. The title of the finished product coming out in February is Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham, a phrase of dialog from his early movie Bananas. I’ve hopscotched through it, first taking a look at chapter about the erupting scandals around two of the adopted children of his long-time romantic partner Mia Farrow: the affair with 21-year-old Soon-Yi Previn and the allegations of molestation with the 7 year old Dylan Farrow. This, to me, is the central ‘tell’ of the book: does author Patrick McGilligan whitewash Allen’s behavior, sensationalize it, or something in between?
I’d say it’s somewhere in between. The long chapter of Mia Farrow’s learning of the affair with Soon-Yi and the molestation allegations months later is detailed and scrupulously seems to stick to the facts as available from all the conflicting narratives and to not make a clear judgement either way. Neither Allen nor Farrow come across very well, as the bitter emotional and legal battles are entwined with a mystifying continuance of their relationship and several attempts at reconciliation.
Aside from the sordid accounts in this chapter, what was notable to me were the passages connecting Allen’s legal and interviews he gave moves with his long history of scrupulously and ruthlessly defending his image, which I wasn’t fully aware of. His career is littered with lawsuits and hostile publicity attacks against others. Indeed, Allen’s own 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, is a perfect example. While I haven’t read it, the snippets that come up in this current book make clear how self-serving and how hostile towards Farrow that memoir was.
For me, it was the preceding chapter that contained more tell-tale signs of Allen’s guilt than was the account of all the conflicting narratives of the legal battles. Here we see the tumultuous relationship between Farrow and Allen in the years leading up to all this, when he participated with Farrow in her adoption of Dylan, and with the pregnancy and birth of Allen’s biological child Satchel. Both in the facts of the odd dynamics of their relationship, with Farrow as a supermother figure and Allen as a largely indifferent father, as well as the autobiographical echoes in Allen’s movies of this era, there are many serious flaws to be discerned in Allen’s charachter. The book discusses September and Another Woman in particular as telegraphing Allen’s hostility.
My favorite, Hannah and Her Sisters, comes into play here as well, since it was full of autobiographical details, particularly of Mia Farrow. It is impossible for me now not to see that movie as full of Woody Allen’s sick fantasies and hostility. Farrow’s character in the movie has lots of adopted kids, though her husband, played by Michael Caine, is never portrayed in the movie as being involved with them. His arc in the plot is having an affair with the Farrow character’s younger sister, and it seems obvious to me now that Allen was telegraphing his growing desires for the then-teenage Soon-Yi by displacing them into this part of the plot. Allen came to dislike Hannah and Her Sisters as being overly optimistic and for its happy ending, but as the book points out, this movie was about Farrow, and another movie of the era, Radio Days, was equally if not more sunny and optimistic, but it because it was about Allen’s life, so he continues to like that movie.
I hopscotched through several sections of the book, and I can say it is a very good biography, well-searched and full of details from his boyhood up to his current 89-year old New York self, happily married now to Soon-Yi for 27 years (and in an odd twist, having adopted two children with her, Bechet, a five-month-old girl in 1999, and Manzie Tio, an infant girl in 2000.) You’ll learn lots about him and lots of analysis of his movies. Still, the allegations of the 1990s are ever-present.
From the beginning of the book (note that these quotes are from the advance copies; there may be differences in the final product):
One reality Woody Allen has been defying for a long while now is death. Not that Death: not the Dark Everlasting that haunts his movies, usually humorously, most recently in one of his last films to date, Rifkin’s Festival, in which Death plays a mean game of chess. No--the living death of being declared an “unperson” by the Woke Generation, the most militant of whom do not care if the entertainer has ever been charged or convicted of a crime, but they believe he molested his seven-year-old daughter in 1992, among the many other negative things about him they believe. These true believers have tried to blackball his films, bully other celebrities into denouncing him, destroy his ability to direct more movies—“Cancel” him as a person.
And from the end of the book:
By early 2016, however, the burgeoning movement to punish powerful men who had sexually abused women had gained a second wind from a flurry of legal actions involving sexual-predator cases. And there would arise a fresh firestorm against Woody that would reflect a culmination of themes from his life and career—the disdain from those who liked conformity, puritanical censure by an intolerant younger generation, and the perpetual inability many critics had demonstrated trying to parse Allen’s life.
It may seem from these two quotes that author Patrick McGilligan is seeking to minimize Allen’s behavior by bracketing it within changes in social mores, and his use of the phrases ‘Woke Generation’ and “Cancel” may raise similar suspicions. Nevertheless, I truly find he was solidly critical in his reporting.
In the end...what do I know? I always considered the molestation allegation credible, and yet, in the ensuing decades it has been Mia Farrow’s adopted family who seems to have fractured into bitter factions. I’ve always considered his affair with Soon-Yi Previn to be a horrible betrayal, abusive and unforgiveable. The bullshit about “The heart knows what it wants” always seemed a transparent deflection. And yet, to quote another common phrase, “you can’t argue with success.” They’ve been married for a long time now and seem very devoted to one another. Their adopted children love him. Bechet has written that he has always been loving and supportive, and you can see both Bechet and Manzie Tio posting on Instagram, seemingly happy and well-adjusted young women. Indeed, on Woody Allen’s birthday this past December, Bechet posted several pictures of her and Woody, writing “Happy birthday to the best dad ❤️ Grateful everyday that I can call myself your favorite daughter (no hard feelings @manzieallen 🫰)”, and Manzie also posted a picture of her and Woody, writing “happy birthday to the best of the best. i’ll never understand how i got lucky enough to be your daughter. i love love love you so much.
p.s. i know i’m your favorite daughter 🤫 @bechet_allen
Many of his long-time friends, including Diane Keaton, continue to support him (and yet Allen’s admission that he never knew Keaton was bulemic when they were together until he read her memoir leads your mind back to ‘what an asshole”). He has continued to attract top actors and actors for his film projects. In the end...it’s all a mystery of life to me, how people can seem to be both absolute shits yet also at time seem to be the opposite...let alone the eternal conundrum of good art by bad people. (Trump and the MAGA GOP are exceptions to this, of course. I can find absolutely zero redeeming qualities in any of them!)
So, did I put this book on my 20% off preorders list? I did, but as I was writing this review, I decided I would take it off...but as I continued to write the review, and changed my mind back again and kept it on the list.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
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