What do we do with Woody Allen’s films? Beyond platitudes of separating art from artist, a fresh reckoning is in order

Share:

I first saw New York through Woody Allen’s eyes; way before my feet landed in the city, my eyes knew the Boating Lake in Central Park, the Queensboro Bridge, the Washington Square Park arch. In 2015, I moved to the city to study cinema, a decision that I partly attribute to my voracious watching of his films which romanticised the city so much that I couldn’t say no when there was a chance to live and work there.

For most of my life, even before I studied cinema, Allen has been present in the periphery of the culture I consumed — he made films, I watched them; he said, I listened. With rapt eyes, with an open heart, in disbelief of the impossibility of his endless genius. Till, of course, Dylan Farrow’s 2017 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, “Why has the #MeToo revolution spared Woody Allen?” educated me about a side to Allen that was first heartbreaking, then infuriating, and upon a further close-reading of his films, always sitting there, waiting to be discovered.

“Separate the artist from their art,” is something we, as audiences and critics, often tell ourselves to ease the blow of dejection that comes with knowing that we have idolised a morally degenerate artist — be it Roman Polanski, Louis CK, or Woody Allen. One can cite Barthes and believe that the author is dead but with Allen, as the recent docu-series Allen v Farrow shows us, the artist and the art are inseparable: The man who would go on to face charges accusing him of sexually abusing his seven-year-old adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow, is the one who made Manhattan.

In Manhattan, Allen’s 42-year-old character, Isaac Davis, “dates” a 17-year-old school student, Tracy. I use quotation marks not just because an autonomous romantic relationship is barely possible with so much imbalance of power but also because it brushes against the fringes of legality in New York City. At 17, Tracy is just about legal to provide consent to a sexual relationship. Allen’s insistence on a virginal, pure, much younger female protagonist (often pitted against a more jaded, “eccentric” older female lead) runs as a narrative thread through several of his films. It’s almost like he whetted our appetite for his moral corruptness and then kept feeding us more of it. As an erstwhile fan of his work, my larger disbelief is that I lapped it all up and kept asking for more.