Woody Allen…
One of the great filmmakers and comedy writers of the last 50 years finally sets the record straight on himself, his career, his films, his love of sports and music, and the many misconceptions about himself and his life. The book is called Apropos of Nothing, published this past March by Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing. And this book is entirely Woody Allen’s voice, being that Allen is an accomplished writer, no ghost-writer BS in this, no fancy PR stunts (although there is certainly some damage control). Arcade did the right thing publishing it so quickly after the spineless captain’s mutiny by ghost ship Hachette. Hachette, who refused to publish it, after having committed to doing just that, instead still has one of their notable autobiographies, a little book written by a famously genocidal Austrian in 1925 called “Mein Kampf”, the wild philosophical ramblings of… yeah, exactly. Hachette still publishes “Mein Kampf”. It’s funny when it sinks in.
In Apropos of Nothing, Allen writes that he doesn’t like his own films too much, kind of his usual self-deprecation, but the facts of his life are told simultaneously as objectively and as subjectively as one might be able to, when having to depict and do justice to one’s own life – and by “do justice” Allen has certainly had his share of pitchforks and torches thrust at him, mob justice, almost exclusively in the increasingly wasted cultural wasteland of the USA. Woody Allen’s movies speak for themselves – honest, direct, plumbing our collective psychology, and laying bare with a 49-film body of work how troubled, desperate, and checkered human history really is, mostly via comedy. Anyone who knows his films and has absorbed some of the humanity therein knows why all of the best actors always wanted to be in Woody Allen’s films. Allen has not only written some of the better small-budget films since he started his one-a-year schedule 50 years ago, but he has consistently had among the best roles for women, in an industry not great at all for women, by and large. He also paid women the same as the male actors. And Allen has also had a proportionate and healthy number of women on his crews and his post-production teams, for the vast majority of his career.
What is it that has made Woody Allen a controversial figure frequently being henpecked by digitally oversaturated Millennials and by aging, overcompensating politically-correct Puritans on the Left who seem aimlessly driven by their own mediocrity? Besides the breakup with Mia and her wild slew of unlikely and false accusations, and after a couple of decades of relative tranquility in the wake of the initial investigation (in which he was cleared of all accusations and was not charged with a crime), Allen never stopped his work ethic and his devotion to great films. The content of his films and his commitment to figuring out human behavior via writing and film were always at the zenith of the artistic arc in the film world. So what then happened circa 2017 was the generation of know-nothing, Internet-fattened, wisdom-starved Millennials were looking for their latest lynching-of-the-week or boycott-of-the-week, always without reading past the headline of most articles they stumble across online. And since Millennials grew up used to “free” content (hm… “free”) and not paying for any of their media, news, and entertainment, they have not dug too deep into anything other than the usual raging territory of things that happened before they were born and re-litigating history as they see fit. Millennials usually, as is pointed out, begin the “guilty by accusation” tactics, their barely-human digital activism and fabricating a fake curated reality, regardless of there being a much better actual reality still existing not far from their screens. Millennial “heroes” and notable influences to them are very often digital paper cutouts or YouTube accidents culled from anyone able to cobble together a few thousand chuckleheads to dribble some kind of digitally tangible agreement. The fact that Millennial standout and mother-mythologized Ronan Farrow’s own uncle John Farrow, Mia Farrow’s closest brother, was put in jail in 2013 for about 11 to 15 counts of pedophilia is bizarrely left out of Ronan’s “seminal” articles on predators … and that Ronan’s uncle John has also been scrubbed from Ronan’s Wikipedia page while other Farrows remain… clearly a case of some kind of perjury by omission. If that doesn’t smack of curating and censorship in ways that are typically hypocritical of this Millennial tendency to block, delete, and “book-burn”, then nothing does. Hear that echo in the void…?
Why Millennials often don’t let new information in is a fair question. It seems a lot like this age of information tribalism, an age I and others old enough to have seen it taking shape, has become sort of a lost promise and missed opportunity for those of us in that last generation before this fragmented reality came to existence via Internet culture. The promise of information freedom has turned into even more lies, factionalism, flimsy simpleton heroes, and alternate realities foisted on gullible souls by con-men. And there is a new kind of soft fascism often conducted by people too intellectually autistic or incuriously on the spectrum from spending their formative years online to realize they know nothing of Marshall McLuhan, much less the message of their medium. But all this is a kind of acceptable normal for many myopic Millennials growing up in the social media weeds. Allen and a lot of the rest of us are mostly staring aghast at the pointless damage, sort of like watching a wildfire burning through a place we used to kind of like.
While the MeToo movement was important, what Millennials and many others who jumped on board to expiate their own sins have failed to realize or speak much of is that the efforts of feminism and equal rights and creating a level playing field for all started long ago, long before this generation was born, surprisingly(!) not anywhere near around the time Facebook came out. Kind of a newsworthy evolutionary item Millennials may have missed. And in addition to many others, some of the progress that has been made was not just from activists and agents of change in the last hundred years, but also because of artists and directors, among many, like Robert Altman, Spike Lee, and Woody Allen, employing great female actors. And, of course, also because of men and women beginning to do the right thing, the social evolution of the human race. Woody Allen has always been interested in the motivations and development of these more important things in the world, as anyone who has a knowledge of his work knows. The shallowness of throwing Allen or anyone not guilty under the bus comes from the lack of due process inherent in a mob mentality and in the laziness that has developed in many people, a trait particularly prominent in a lot of angry Millennials and others not wanting to take the time to develop real wisdom and lasting experiences – and that’s a laziness that is precipitating major cracks in civilization.
Of course, these same assholes, Millennials, and other uninformed Woody Allen denigrators don’t seem to say much about performers they prefer who have committed bigger crimes, like Chuck Berry (who went to prison for sleeping with and dating an underage teen), Jerry Lee Lewis (screwed his 14-year-old cousin as an adult), James Brown, Bill Wyman, Little Richard, Jimmy Page, and so on, ad infinitum, performers who slept with whomever they felt like sleeping with, really didn’t do much for women and didn’t write great roles for them, and could care less how much women got paid to act or sing. But that’s the arbitrary double-standard with which a lot of people often operate who cherry-pick toward which celebrity to direct their misplaced indignation. And these angry Philistines who don’t realize the extent of their slander or libel get very flustered and even more stubborn if you point out their obvious hypocrisy. And of course there’s the warped intensity of the Farrows, who had a lot of weapons and other resources at their disposal – and were willing to lie and fabricate, including using a family friend, prominent New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof, to keep pushing lies and slander to the public and fulfill their agenda of destroying Woody Allen and his career. And the Farrows strategically knew that Allen was predisposed to people not giving him the benefit of the doubt and preyed upon that opening Mia Farrow manufactured, in order to replace Allen with a fraudulent and non-existent doppelganger.
All this is relevant to Allen’s book because he should be enjoying his golden years now, but instead is having to continue to defend himself against the tides of this kind of false accusation-spewing hard-headed mob. The kind of inadvertent and ignorant nihilism that the mob has engaged in, in the attempt to speed history along according to their whims and preferences, is as bad as destroying relics or ancient temples, mainly because the impatience and the arrogance of this generation is only causing self-inflicted wounds on some of these fragile angry souls. In an ironic development, the destroyers have forgotten that Woody Allen was always the champion for the fragile souls, in our culture’s previous incarnation, and his films showcasing sensitivity and honesty were why Woody Allen became so beloved in the first place. Woody, through his writing and his films, was the voice of the meek and the not-cool, Woody taught us that you didn’t have to be cool, tough, or popular to have a niche somewhere. Allen showcased Bix Beiderbecke, Ingmar Bergman, the Marx brothers, Diane Keaton, Marshall McLuhan, Wallace Shawn, great old jazz and bluegrass tunes, and saved a lot of souls from much worse psychological traumas by doing what he did, making these great and often profound films, year after year, and decade after decade, passionately, with integrity. And all while having one of the most enviable track records of treating people well in an industry that, like most industries, doesn’t treat people well. Hollywood is, of course, one of the great historical cattle call zones. And Woody Allen was always the antithesis of that kind of opportunistic bullshit and debasement of humanity.
But if you or anyone else needs to be convinced of these things, you probably were reading Allen’s book for the wrong reasons. Or you didn’t bother reading it, stumbled into this article, and maybe never knew the first thing about Woody Allen, in the first place. One of the problems with our culture is that too many people are happy with their false sense of certainty, hollow notions, or incorrect facts. Someone who loves Allen’s films, writing, and life will likely and enthusiastically agree that Allen has a lifelong history of having treated people well and having been an excellent filmmaker, without reservation. And the young Millennial Ronan-ite plugged into their smartphone screen over there in the corner of the room, a touch of a fearful budding Philistine in their eyes, predisposed to believing gossip, headlines, and flotsam will feel that Woody is still Rosemary’s baby (seriously, that’s actually Ronan) and that nothing in this new book will change that view for the cult mentality of an inflexible Millennial stuck in the wasteland, not the verifiable fact that Mia Farrow’s brother John Farrow is in jail for multiple counts of pedophilia since 2013, not that Woody Allen’s track record in the film industry is sparkling and without parallel, and not that many of Hollywood’s more trustworthy voices have still spoken in favor of Woody Allen.
In terms of quality of films and the quality of the writing and production and acting, Woody Allen was always one of the good guys and refreshing voices in Hollywood and was always based in New York City as an antidote, in terms of the global film community, never respecting or wanting to be a part of the soul-killing Hollywood apparatus.
Among film lovers, we needed Woody Allen’s thoughts, emotions, and so on in the sea of Hollywood garbage and formula… and Woody Allen symbolized the fight against the wolves and the sleazy cat-callers and abusers and idiots and Woody had lots of terrific jokes about them and the size of their craniums and surgically exposed the dark side of humanity and male sexuality in a way that made it all transparent… and also in a way that could make us laugh at ourselves. Woody Allen is quite literally one of the great comic minds in film history. And arguably the most sensitive. His scripts spoke not just from his perspective but closer to the characters’ perspectives and to the perspective of the women in his films, more so than most other auteurs. The question remains how and why was Woody Allen thrown under the bus with no new developments in Woody Allen’s life, other than making films… and this sacrifice at the altar of accusations is particularly odd from Millennials, who like to imagine themselves as sensitive and in tune with the feelings of others, except that this self-analysis that Millennials have of themselves as empathic is very far off from reality, as they far more often seem to actually embody people who are only immersed in their own feelings, their own screens, their unique brand of pan-global, one-dimensional and shortsighted Asperger’s comprehension. And so Millennials may more accurately be known as the generation of annihilation and self-immolation via laptop radiance, a large part of their legacy thus far…
Long before any trouble, there were always people who hated Woody Allen and didn’t understand his films and it was always due to some deeply shallow observation about his looks or his voice or his glasses or the fact that he was essentially a leading man who was an oddball and not classically handsome. People in the world need to be better, as good films and good writers point out, but as a whole we may now possibly be worse, and people who build too many fantasies and illusions eventually have the whole thing collapse in on them. Woody Allen faced those Hollywood fantasies with which we grew up with a dose of realism, as he did in The Purple Rose of Cairo. And it was always an intelligent subtext and narrative he created. So how then did Hollywood, which has always generally supported Woody Allen, at least critically, let a shallow Millennial-led social media mob and an elitist snobby piker taking orders from his vengeful mother, like Ronan Farrow, someone with no real major achievements pre-2017, do so much unnecessary damage to one of the great directors of the past 50 years? Part of it was Woody Allen‘s reticence and passivity, thinking the slander would be diluted over time (and it was for over two decades) and part of it was also that for years before Ronan’s onslaught that started about seven years ago, after a couple of decades during which Allen did have relative creative and personal peace, the drama seemed to have passed. The new attacks by the Farrows began just after Mia Farrow’s brother John Farrow went to prison for pedophilia. Fascinating timing, anyone might observe. In a court of law, that would be far more than slightly significant. It might have even made a stronger case for the unprosecuted crime of her own false accusations staring at Mia Farrow in her rearview mirror. But there are many alternate realities now in Hollywood and our culture at large, even among liberal-minded people. Ms. Farrow was one of the first to benefit from the “guilty by accusation” smears used more often in recent years.
Woody Allen has not always made the best decisions, but then again nor did you or I, part of the time. And some of you need to stop holding successful people to a higher standard just because they made a bigger mistake than you ever have, because mistakes are not always crimes and because someone’s success should not make them a target for your derision and your feelings of impotence that your life didn’t work out as well as some actor or director.
I’ve heard of this guy who helped start a radio station in upstate New York and he trashes Woody Allen occasionally, when he’s in the company of Woody Allen hunters, even though he grew up loving Woody Allen (and still does in his heart of hearts) and he definitely did not believe the crazy allegations back in 1992 for a second, but he wants to appear to be politically correct now that part of his primary audience is politically correct Millennials… so this fellow, a Woody Allen lover at heart, essentially changed his own longstanding innocent verdict based on marketing and based on wanting to appear politically correct to youngsters to whom he now feels he belongs. He thinks of it to himself as if he has “evolved”, not realizing he has actually devolved. But: he has succeeded in becoming a Zelig.
The singer Nick Cave once said in an interview that the crux of his songs is “boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, end of story.” Woody Allen‘s films were also about exploring romance and that kind of emotional and physical love in all of its different colors, shapes, sizes, disappointments, and manifestations… but of course it’s no surprise that Millennials have decided for all of us, in their minds, that transparent and frank sexuality is off-limits now. Here’s some more bad news for Millennials, in some obvious ways: statistics actually show Millennials are the generation that’s having the least amount of sex and likely the least amount of fun. Wager a bet that it’s due to their real-life awkwardness when not fondling a screen…? And Millennials had become highly puritanical and paranoid in regard to sex, long before any global virus took what remains of their social life and any kind of actual freewheeling fun away. What has happened with this misguided Millennial emphasis on a condescending and pious morality is referred to by Woody Allen in Apropos of Nothing as the “appropriate police”. It also used to just be called “square”. Jeezus. Awful development… Squares won the cultural battle for our hearts and souls.
Telling someone the truth, in art or anywhere else, is not what it used to be. People believe their own fantasies, wholesale. The new tendency is that people will believe more than ever whatever they want to believe, in a way that is more far-reaching and harmful than in previous generations. Woody Allen’s films were always about breaking through a lot of the myths and fantasies of the human condition, how we’re not and never will be Bogart, and how we lie to ourselves – and now we’re knee-deep in a generation where digital culture lies to itself at breakneck speed, daily and willingly. Allen breaking the fourth wall in Annie Hall in 1977 was liberating at the time – there appearing on the screen was Marshall McLuhan, in the flesh to clear the air, demystify, and spot the bullshitter. Instead, we now have a Confederacy of Bullshitters, all convinced they’re on the one and only holy mission, not quite aware of the staggering degree of their own viral solipsism, as they fall asleep beside their glowing digital companion, a fucking computer telephone. Ironically, Woody’s films have all the secrets of debunking behavioral and cultural bullshit in them. It’s up to anyone personally to see that sort of message in art … or, if not, to blindly continue to ignore the signs and willfully choose not to go past that online paywall, to continue to only read headlines, languish in shallow ignorance, to not explore deeper levels of information. That seems to be the direction of the current cultural and intellectual epidemic.
Maybe the trend of embracing lies in our culture will win this moment in history, as it sometimes has in the past. The Puritans in England managed to ban theater for a decade or two not long after Shakespeare died and tore down theaters, even beat actors publicly there in the UK. Then eventually the arc of history made more sense and the Bard’s work is now, of course, unanimously regarded as monumental. But we find ourselves still in a badly mismanaged puritanical reality, where most people don’t even know what a Philistine is… victims of their self-inflicted Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
Watching, enjoying, or loving Woody Allen’s films has always been a choice, up to our discretion… but making choices for other people by banning films or books is not anyone else’s choice. And definitely not yours. Woody Allen’s new book is really a guidebook of sorts to that group of 49 films Allen has made and the views therein, this new book being a manual to what Woody Allen as a writer, artist, and human being has intended. If liberating the human inquiry a bit more through clarity and honesty is not your thing, then put the book down, don’t watch his films, continue your badly-informed slander of one of film’s most remarkable and unlikely legends. Nothing else to do for the rest of us but to keep trying to pursue truth and exposing bullshit. Life goes on with or without you. And for those who’d rather still watch the films, it’s been very nice and very illuminating to have had these 49 Woody Allen films to enjoy. And to now have this book. ♠️
(392 pages. Published by Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing. )
(Published by Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing.)
