Woody Allen: Reckoning with the Artist vs. The Art

Woody Allen is my most seen director at 28 movies. I know that is mostly the by-product of his decades-long output, but in all honesty it’s also the outcome of years of adulation. Woody Allen made neurosis painfully funny, working his way from parody and visual gags, to deep psychological homages to Russian literature, and now a later career of heavy hitters, such as “Match Point,” “Midnight in Paris,” and “Blue Jasmine.” His work touched so many people and introduced so many others to important cultural touchstones. He is also a sexual predator.

HBO recently released three episodes of their four part documentary Allen v. Farrow, and it was of course upsetting and incendiary right off the bat. While these allegations resurfaced during the #MeToo movement, in part because of Ronan Farrow, the gravity of the allegations still did not dead stop his career. When the allegations initially came out, many public figures saw it as a weaponization of a child during a tumultuous public break-up. There was little that the Farrows could say that Allen’s many friends and collaborators wouldn’t dispute, most publicly being Diane Keaton and even Scarlett Johansson and Alec Baldwin recently. Regardless of literally all of that, Allen married his former partner’s young adopted daughter, who he had known since she was a child. This was dismissed as a strange but not illegal life choice.

Everyone is now publicly saying they will not watch another Woody Allen film or work with him, a decline that has been ramping up slowly over the past four years. A broader conversation has been taking place since #MeToo, on whether you could separate the art from the artist. Any way you slice it, you absolutely can not do this with Woody Allen, and I would like to point out it’s rare that an artist can be separated from their work. Woody Allen’s films are about his own perspective on the world, sometimes even starring himself in the title role. His films are about nostalgia, jazz, his childhood, New York City, and most obviously, white people. His films follow such a similar frame of reference that he has been able to make a film a year since 1972.

I knew about some of these issues in earlier years, but I did not fully disengage from his work until 2017. I was mulling the idea of the artist vs their art, as many idols and lesser gods fell by the wayside. I wasn’t quite ready to start axing films from my to-watch list, because though the people who made them (or were featured in them) were monsters, the film itself was an important cultural touchstone that should not be desecrated. I had also seen 27 Woody Allen films by that point, and the fact that I didn’t sniff out his horrendous disposition previously was too brutal a reality to ponder without regret. That number 28 was the ultimate nail in the coffin: “Whatever Works.” If there was ever an admission of guilt it was this film; where an Allen stand-in (played by Larry David) marries a child like 20 year old, though David was 68 years old at the time. It wasn’t that Woody Allen became tainted for me at that moment. I realized that Woody Allen had always made films like this, and legitimized unconscionable beliefs and behaviors in most, if not all, of his work. I have never seen another Woody Allen movie since and I never will.

He had told me this was who he was years earlier. By my junior year of high school I had seen several of his films. It was at this pivotal moment that I watched “Manhattan.” The film follows a nebbish neurotic, played by Allen, who is split between two women, one of whom he is in a relationship with, and is also 17 years old. For context, this was one of the greatest directors' most acclaimed and pivotal work, his second most beloved after “Annie Hall.” I had no broader context, no necessary dialogue explaining that this was a work of its time, or that it was not okay. It was presented as a heady, lovelorn version of a city beloved by its narrator. From a very early stage I was conditioned to believe this was normal. This would repeat itself in later films he directed.

Art vs. the artist will be a continuing dialogue we will need to have in the coming years, as the dunderheaded opinions on cancel culture mount. Content is now often consumed or not consumed as a form of protest, rather than for enjoyment purposes (Example, Example, Example). The recent Dr. Seuss kerfuffle is definitely a great recent example of someone asking for accountability, not censorship or canceling, and getting subsequent backlash. Instead of the focus being on past insensitive work, and talking about the best way to contextualize it for our kids, it became about the legacy of an author who has been dead for 30 years. We need to look at who these actions hurt, and what these works say about society. At this point we should not be caring about the prestige of a writer who published horribly racist content for many years, especially when this will ultimately affect .000001% of his legacy.

I think every film lover is grappling with the line they need to draw in the sand, as there are many films we all need to see, made by terrible men such as Roman Polanski, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Stanley Kubrick, DW Griffith, Mel Gibson, and my actual favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock. Of course, there are clear next steps for what we all need to do in the future.

Stop giving money and recognition to living criminals and monsters. Art is never worth the toll of human suffering, which comes from abusers, rapists, and racists getting artistic recognition at the expense of their victims.
Contextualize all of these terrible people’s work by explaining who they were as people.
Provide warnings and disclaimers every time this content is consumed. Consumption without context can sometimes legitimize terrible ideas, i.e. “Manhattan,” normalizing underage girls dating older men.
Choose for yourself what you want to consume, but never normalize the behavior with others. No one needs to be recommending “Wonder Wheel” without context in the year of our Lord 2021.

I’m very close to surpassing that 28 number. I have seen 26 Alfred Hitchcock movies, and I have many available to watch. I hope to soon look at my most seen directors list and not see that monster’s name at the top. While I never want to forget the experience of watching one of his films, and what it taught me about the possibilities the world has to offer, I want to forget how aggressive and predatory behavior was legitimized for me at an early age. So many different films taught me that I was ready to be an adult, that grooming behaviors were romantic, and trauma was necessary. I owe it to my younger self to undo a lot of former damage, and make sure I never condone its infliction on anyone else.