Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Roll Call
Woody Allen
I started keeping a list.
Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop. And what about the women? The list immediately becomes much more tentative: Anne Sexton? Joan Crawford? Sylvia Plath? Does self-harm count? Okay, well, it’s back to the men, I guess: Pablo Picasso, Lead Belly, Miles Davis, Phil Spector. Add your own; add a new one every week, every day. Charlie Rose. Carl Andre. Johnny Depp.
They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or . . . we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption.
How do we separate the maker from the made? Do we undergo a willful forgetting when we decide to listen to, say, Wagner’s Ring cycle? (Forgetting is easier for some than others; Wagner’s work has rarely been performed in Israel since 1938.) Or do we believe genius gets special dispensation, a behavioral hall pass?
And how does our answer change from situation to situation? Are we consistent in the ways we apply the punishment, or rigor, of the withdrawal of our audience-ship? Certain pieces of art seem to have been rendered unconsumable by their maker’s transgressions—how can one watch The Cosby Show after the rape allegations against Bill Cosby? I mean, obviously it’s technically doable, but are we even watching the show? Or are we taking in the spectacle of our own lost innocence?
And is it simply a matter of pragmatics? Do we withhold our support if the person is alive and therefore might benefit financially from our consumption of their work? Do we vote with our wallets? If so, is it okay to stream, say, a Roman Polanski movie for free? Can we, um, watch it at a friend’s house?
These questions became more urgent as the years went by—as, in fact, we entered a new era. Here’s the thing about new eras: You don’t really recognize them as they show up. They’re not carrying signposts. And maybe “new era” is not quite the right phrase. Maybe we entered an era where certain stark realities began to be clearer to people who had heretofore been able to ignore them. One such reality was made clear on October 7, 2016. I sat in my living room, the same room where on sunlit afternoons and black evenings I guiltily lost myself in the films of Roman Polanski, and I watched the Access Hollywood tape over and over.
This was a very specific way of being an audience—watching something compulsively, as if you could somehow change it or take responsibility for it by keeping your eyes on it. I remembered it from the two Gulf wars, and from 9/11, and before that from my early childhood, when my family gathered around the TV to watch the Watergate trials. As if watching could Do Something.
I drank coffee and ate buttered toast and watched as the Republican presidential candidate talked about grabbing women by the pussy. You don’t need me to remind you.
I watched with all the old memories inside my body, the kind of memories so many women have. And the denial of the memories was in there too. The denial was so deep that when I heard . . .
Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
. . . I didn’t even realize he was describing assault. Didn’t realize until I went on social media to monitor the response to the news and some dude named it: “This is assault.”
On that awful day, one good thing happened, a thing that foretold a growing movement: it happened on the Twitter feed of Kelly Oxford, a model and bestselling author, the kind of person who normally sort of chaps my hide. Where does she get off being so pretty and bestselling? But Oxford tweeted this out: “Women: tweet me your first assaults. they aren’t just stats. I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12.” Especially powerful was one little word in Oxford’s original tweet: “first.” It implied a list.
I had my own list—my first assault, by a family friend, happened to me when I was thirteen. The first. Followed by two attempted rapes, multiple physical assaults on the street, and god knows how many unwanted gropings. I followed avidly as, over the next fourteen hours, Oxford received more than a million tweets from women describing their first assaults. At one point she was receiving a minimum of fifty tweets per minute. This was a year before the #MeToo movement exploded.
All these women sorta rubbed their eyes and looked around and said, “Hunh. What she just called assault is what happened to me.” A rock had been turned over and revealed a bunch of sex pests, scuttling around in the newly bright light.
That day felt, at the time, like a moment of horizontal static on the smooth screen of reality. Surely this was just a glitch, a campaign-ending unforced error. Surely Hillary Clinton would be elected and everything would return to normal. It was just newly dawning on me that normal was not so good, anyway; that what the election of Hillary Clinton would mean was a continuation of a reality that was growing more unforgiving for everyone; that liberalism was a failed plan for protecting ourselves from ourselves.
Even so, I didn’t want this. Didn’t want this particular disruption of the smooth screen of accepted reality. In any case, it didn’t matter what I wanted. The Trumpian static turned out to be, in fact, our new reality. The demoralizing and sick-making effect of the tape only increased over the next month as it became clear that it would have absolutely zero effect on Trump’s viability as a candidate. The static was where we lived now.
And so, amid that static, in the context of that static, feeling pretty staticky myself, I asked more and more often: what ought we to do about great art made by bad men?
. . .
But hold up for a minute: who is this “we” that’s always turning up in critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It’s the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say “we,” I mean I. I mean you.
I knew Polanski was worse, whatever that means. But Woody Allen was the person who engendered the most soul-searching in the average audience member. When I brought up the idea that an artist’s behavior might prevent us from consuming their work, Woody Allen was the reference point. Almost everyone had a position on the Woody thing.
Real quotes:
“Midnight in Paris was glorious. I just put the other stuff out of my mind.”
“Oh, I could never go see a Woody Allen film.”
“I grew up watching his movies. I love his movies, they’re part of my life.”
“It’s all a plot cooked up by Mia.”
“I’m just glad his stuff sucks now, so I don’t have to worry about it.” (Okay, this one is from me.)
A lot of rumors and accusations floated around Woody Allen’s small person, like a halo of flies. His daughter Dylan Farrow, backed by one sibling, disavowed by another, has held firm in her accusations against Allen, saying he molested her when she was seven years old. We don’t know the real story, and we might never know. What we do know for sure: Woody Allen slept with Soon-Yi Previn, the child of his partner Mia Farrow. Soon-Yi was either a high school student or a college freshman the first time he slept with her, and he the most famous film director in the world.
Today the debate rages on about the accusations made by Dylan Farrow, but the Soon-Yi story was the one that disrupted and rearranged my own viewing of Allen’s films. I took the fucking of Soon-Yi as a terrible betrayal of me personally. When I was young, I felt like Woody Allen. I intuited or believed he represented me on-screen. He was me. This is one of the peculiar aspects of his genius—this ability to stand in for the audience. The identification was exacerbated by the seeming powerlessness of his on-screen persona: skinny as a kid, short as a kid, confused by an uncaring, incomprehensible world. (Like Chaplin before him.) I felt closer to him than seems reasonable for a little girl to feel about a grown-up male filmmaker. In some mad way I felt he belonged to me. I had always seen him as one of us, the powerless. Post–Soon-Yi, I saw him as a predator.
Sleeping with your partner’s child—that requires a special kind of creep. I can hear you arguing this, you Woody-defenders, even now, in my brain, saying that Woody was not Soon-Yi’s parent, that he was her mother’s boyfriend, that I’m being hysterical. But I have a special knowledge of this kind of relationship: I was raised by my mother and her boyfriend Larry. And I assure you that Larry was my parent.
Woody elicited in me an emotional response, which arose from a very specific place. As a kid growing up in the 1970s, I experienced my share (what’s a share, in this case?) of predatory adults, but none of them were my parent.
In fact, to accept the idea that Woody was not Soon-Yi’s parent does violence to the very idea of my relationship with Larry, one of the most cherished of my life. And perhaps that was the key to my response, when the news of Woody and Soon-Yi came out: I was even more disgusted by the whole mess than I might’ve been otherwise, because I myself had a mother’s boyfriend in my life—in my case, someone I adore and respect to this day. The story of Woody and Soon-Yi—at least the way it came to me—perverted this delicate relationship.
In other words: My response wasn’t logical. It was emotional.
Now, all these years later, I wanted to revisit Woody Allen, see if the work had been fatally disrupted. And so one rainy afternoon I flopped down on the living room couch and committed an act of transgression—I on-demanded Annie Hall. It was easy. I just clicked the OK button on my massive universal remote and then rummaged around in a bag of cookies while I waited for the movie to cue up. As acts of transgression go, it was pretty undramatic.
The black title cards rolled past, with their old-friend names Jack Rollins, Charles H. Joffe, spelled out in that familiar font, the second–most civilized font in the world (after that of The New Yorker, another venue where serifs do the work of congratulating the audience on its good taste).
Annie Hall was, it turned out, still good. I’d watched the movie at least a dozen times before, but even so it charmed me all over again. Annie Hall is a jeu d’esprit, an Astaire soft shoe, a helium balloon straining at its ribbon. Annie Hall is a frivolity, in the very best sense. It’s no accident that the most famous thing about the film is Annie’s clothes. In her men’s vest, tie, chinos, her unsure, down-dipping eyes peering out from under a big black hat, Annie is a thief of the serious clothes of serious men; she’s snuck into manland and swiped its trappings. Not for empowerment, just for fun.
Style is everything in Annie Hall. That’s the film’s genius. Woody Allen’s genius. Alvy is forever maundering away about the end of the world (Allen wanted to call the film Anhedonia), but it’s Annie’s nonsensical, almost nonverbal weltanschauung that lifts the movie into flight. Her smile, her sunglasses, her poignant undershirts are her philosophy and her meaning. The pauses and the nonsense syllables between her words are as important as the words themselves. “I never said ‘La-di-da’ in my life until he wrote it, but I was a person who couldn’t complete a sentence,” Keaton told Katie Couric in an interview, describing the way the character had been built around her. Annie’s vernacular was Keaton’s own prattle, but fine-tuned, amped up, scripted.
Even the love story stops making sense—it’s a love story for people who don’t believe in love. Annie and Alvy come together, pull apart, come together, and then break up for good. The End. Their relationship was pointless all along, and entirely worthwhile.
Ultimately Annie’s refrain of “la-di-da” is the governing spirit of the enterprise, the nonsense syllables that give joyous expression to Allen’s dime-store existentialism and the inevitability of the death of love. “La-di-da” means: nothing matters. It means: let’s have fun while we crash and burn. It means: our hearts are going to break, isn’t it a lark?
Keaton is daring to look like a moron; Allen is daring to burn film on the spectacle of her goofiness; the two of them, director and actress, wobble their way through the movie. Equipoise is the ethos; the grace is in not quite falling.
Everything about Diane Keaton’s performance in Annie Hall is inimitable, and we know that for a fact because what happened next was that every woman in America went around trying to imitate her—and failed. Style looks easy, but is not. This is true about Annie Hall across the board. All the things that look easy are not: the pastiche form; the integration of schlocky jokes with an emotional tenor of ambivalence; the refusal of a happy ending, tempered by the spritzing about of a general feeling of very grown-up friendliness.
Annie Hall is the greatest comic film of the twentieth century—better than Bringing Up Baby, better even than Caddyshack—because it acknowledges the irrepressible nihilism lurking at the center of all comedy. Also, it’s really funny. To watch Annie Hall is to feel, for just a moment, that one belongs to the human race. Watching, you feel almost mugged by the sense of belonging. That fabricated connection can be more beautiful than love itself. A simulacrum that becomes more real than the thing it represents. And that’s how I define great art.
Look, I don’t get to go around feeling connected to humanity all the time. It’s a rare pleasure. And I was supposed to give it up just because Woody Allen behaved like a terrible person? It hardly seemed fair.
As I said, Allen wanted to give Annie Hall an alternate title: Anhedonia. The inability to experience pleasure. My own ability to experience pleasure, specifically pleasure arising from consuming art, was imperiled all the time—by depression, by jadedness, by distraction. And now I was finding I must also take into account biography; an artist’s biography as a disrupter of my own pleasure.
The week after I watched Annie Hall, I went out to coffee with a former coworker, Sara. We sat in a dingy café on Seattle’s Capitol Hill and talked about our kids and our writing. With her rosy cheeks and snapping black eyes, Sara looked like a character from a children’s book about plucky pioneers caught in a blizzard; she was the very image of a sweetly reasonable person. When I mentioned in passing that I was writing about, or at least thinking about, Woody Allen, Sara reported that she’d seen a Little Free Library in her neighborhood absolutely crammed to its tiny rafters with books by and about him. It made us both laugh—the mental image of some furious, probably female, fan who just couldn’t bear the sight of those books any longer and stuffed them all in the cute little house.
We made a plan: she would scoop up all the books for me so I could use them for research. I didn’t think of it at the time, but an ill-gotten Woody Allen book was a book I hadn’t paid for—the perfect way to consume the art of someone whose morals you question. We said goodbye, and as I got into my car I received a text from Sara:
“I don’t know where to put all my feelings about Woody Allen,” the text said.
Normally I might have rejected the word “feelings,” with its weakness and its vagueness and its, its womanliness. But Sara was so smart that I read carefully what she texted. Sara was the very model of an enlightened audience member. If she couldn’t manage her feelings about Woody Allen, what hope was there for the rest of us?
I went on a mini tour of women. I told another smart friend, a voluble and charming tech executive, that I was writing about Woody Allen. “I have very many thoughts about Woody Allen!” said my friend, excited to share. We were drinking wine on her porch, and she settled in. “I’m so mad at him! I was already pissed at him over the Soon-Yi thing, and then came the—what’s the kid’s name? Dylan? Then came the Dylan business, and the horrible dismissive statements he made about that. And I hate the way he talks about Soon-Yi, always going on about how he’s enriched her life.”
These are feelings.
My friend had said she had many thoughts about Woody Allen, but that’s not what she was having. This, I think, is what happens to so many of us when we consider the work of the monster geniuses—we tell ourselves we’re having ethical thoughts when really what we’re having are moral feelings. We arrange words around these feelings and call them opinions: “What Woody Allen did was very wrong.” But feelings come from someplace more elemental than thought. The fact was this: I felt upset by the story of Woody and Soon-Yi. I wasn’t thinking, I was feeling. I was affronted, personally somehow.
Here’s how to have some complicated emotions: watch Manhattan.
Like many—many what? many women? many mothers? many former girls? many moral feelers?—I have been unable to watch Manhattan for years.
Of course I saw it when I was young. As a young teenager, I was mostly baffled by it. I mistrusted and didn’t believe in the central relationship—it seemed to me that the whole film was built on a lie or a fantasy—but I didn’t have the words to say that. I second-guessed my own opinion. Meanwhile, I was enchanted with these things: Gershwin; black and white; Alvy’s spiral staircase leading down to his cool living room; the Queensboro Bridge; Chinese food in bed. Manhattan was, after all, about Manhattan—a kind of travelogue for aspirational urbanites. I think now of E. L. Doctorow’s devastating dismissal of Hemingway: reading the not-so-great posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden, Doctorow wrote in a review that he was “depressed enough to wonder if Hemingway’s real achievement in the early great novels was that of a travel writer who taught a provincial American audience what dishes to order, what drinks to prefer and how to deal with the European servant class.” Manhattan is just such a teacher’s aid—you sense Allen wishing he could educate his own younger, greener self in the niceties of bourgeois consumption.
And so for a long time, over decades, I chimed in with the dominant opinion that it was Woody Allen’s best film. Saying that was a way to demonstrate my own sophistication, my own refusal to be tethered by the earth-held bounds of feminism. It was a cultural version of Gillian Flynn’s famous “cool girl” passage from the novel Gone Girl: “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex.” And the movie Manhattan. Flynn goes on to say, “Men actually think this girl exists.” The point is that she does not. The point is that she’s performing a role, pretending she likes these things in order to please some imaginary (or not-so-imaginary) man—maybe a man in real life, maybe a man in her head. (Claire Vaye Watkins wrote well on this in her essay “On Pandering”: “I have built a working miniature replica of the patriarchy in my mind.”) So it was with Manhattan: I didn’t trust my own initial response; I thought what I was supposed to think.
But there was an initial sense of unsavoriness, which prevented me from watching it again . . . ever. Even though I was and am an inveterate re-watcher of films I have loved.
Now, even in the thick of my thinking-about-Woody-Allen project, I still found Manhattan unapproachable. I watched nearly every movie he’s ever made (I skipped Celebrity—I’m not a maniac) before I faced the fact that I would, at some point, need to re-watch Manhattan.
And finally the day came. As I settled in on my couch once again, the first Cosby trial was taking place. It was June of 2017.
Trump had been in office for months. People were unsettled and unhappy, and by people I mean women, and by women I mean me. The women met on the streets and looked at one another and shook their heads and walked away wordlessly. The women had had it. The women went on a giant fed-up march. The women were Facebooking and tweeting and going for long furious walks and giving money to the ACLU and wondering why their partners and children didn’t do the dishes more. The women were realizing the invidiousness of the dishwashing paradigm. The women were becoming radicalized even though the women didn’t really have time to become radicalized. Arlie Russell Hochschild first published The Second Shift in 1989, and in 2017 that shit was truer than ever, or that’s how the women saw it.
The dishes were really getting me down.
Even though I felt that I was as jam-packed with anger as one medium-sized human could possibly be, this feeling of rage was in fact growing and growing. It grew, initially, out of my status as a woman and a feminist. As I said, I felt personally affronted on that score. But my rage was casting its net wider; on wobbly-faun legs, my rage was going forth and finding new objects: the very systems that allowed inequity to flourish. Trump radicalized the right; what I was experiencing was a radicalization in another direction. A questioning of the status quo that was uncomfortable, even awkward.
Despite this growing bolus of opinion, of feeling, of rage, I was determined to try to come to Manhattan with an open mind. After all, lots of people think of it as Allen’s masterpiece, and I was ready to be swept away. And I was swept away during the opening shots—black and white, with jump cuts timed perfectly, almost comically, to the triumphal strains of Rhapsody in Blue. Moments later, we cut to Isaac (Allen’s character), out to dinner with his friends Yale (are you kidding me—“Yale”?) and Yale’s wife, Emily. With them is Allen’s date, seventeen-year-old high school student Tracy, played by Mariel Hemingway.
The really astonishing thing about this scene is its nonchalance. NBD, I’m fucking a high schooler. Sure, Woody Allen’s character Isaac knows the relationship can’t last, but he seems only casually troubled by its moral implications. Isaac is fucking that high schooler with what my mother would call a hey-nonny-nonny. Allen is fascinated with moral shading, except when it comes to this particular issue—the issue of middle-aged men having sex with teenage girls. In the face of this particular issue, one of our greatest observers of contemporary ethics—someone whose mid-career work can approach the Flaubertian—suddenly becomes a dummy. Isaac makes a few noises about his ambivalence about the relationship: “She’s seventeen. I’m forty-two and she’s seventeen. I’m older than her father, can you believe that? I’m dating a girl, wherein, I can beat up her father.”
But those lines feel like posturing in order to disarm the viewer, rather than doing any real work of interrogating the morality of the situation. The specific posture would be butt-covering. One senses Allen performing a kind of artistic grooming of the audience, or maybe even of himself. Just keep saying it’s okay, until somehow miraculously it becomes okay.
In high school, even the ugly girls are beautiful.” A (male) high school teacher once said this to me. (He later mentioned that sometimes he had to go into the bathroom and jerk off because of those high school girls and their high school beauty.)
Tracy’s face, Mariel’s face, is made of open flat planes that suggest fields of wheat and sunshine (it’s an Idaho face, after all). Tracy’s character is written with a similar gorgeous plainness. Allen sees Tracy as good and pure in a way the grown women in the film never can be. Tracy is wise, the way Allen has written her, but unlike the adults in the film she’s entirely, miraculously untroubled by neuroses.
Tracy is glorious simply by being: inert, object-like. Like the great movie stars of old, she’s a face, as Isaac famously states in his litany of reasons to go on living: “Groucho Marx, to name one thing, and Willie Mays . . . those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne, uh, the crabs at Sam Wo’s, uh, Tracy’s face.” (Watching the film for the first time in decades, I was struck by how much Isaac’s list sounded like a Facebook gratitude post.)
Allen/Isaac can get closer to that ideal world, a world that has forgotten its knowledge of death, by having sex with Tracy. Not that she’s a mere sexual object. Because he’s a great filmmaker, Tracy is allowed her say; she’s not a nitwit. “Your concerns are my concerns,” she says, reassuring Isaac about the good health of their relationship. “We have great sex.” This works out well for Isaac. He gets to hoover up her beautiful embodied simplicity and he’s absolved of guilt.
The women in the film don’t have that advantage. The grown women in Manhattan are brittle and all too aware of death; they’re aware of every goddamn thing. A thinking woman is stuck—distanced from the body, from beauty, from life itself.
In Manhattan, Diane Keaton has grown up, swanned her way free of the bildungsroman of Annie Hall. Her Mary is a full-grown woman, and an intellectual at that. Allen’s portrayal of her is a needling send-up of pretension—for instance, when he mocks her pronunciation of “Van Gogh,” with its guttural, almost mucus-y hard G at the end. When she and Isaac are at an art opening, she asserts that a particular piece is “brilliant”:
Isaac: The steel cube was brilliant?
Mary: Yes. To me it was very textual, you know what I mean? It was perfectly integrated, and it had a marvelous kind of negative capability. The rest of the stuff downstairs was bullshit.
The joke is that Mary is too smart. Ha ha ha. This satire might be funnier if it weren’t contrasted with Allen’s adulatory vision of sweet uncorrupted Tracy. Of course Allen had lavished his gaze on Diane Keaton in the past, but with complexity. Annie Hall is a great film because Woody Allen built the thing around one specific woman’s shimmering, weird personhood. He refracts some of his own humanity through Annie. Allen gives the same attention to Tracy he once gave to Annie, but because she’s object rather than person, his vision ultimately feels, to me, claustrophobic, constraining. I’m trying not to write “pervy.”
In Manhattan, the women are allowed to be beautiful objects (Tracy’s face finds its place in a litany with apples and crabs), or they’re frustrated, impotent, ridiculous—in short, caricatures.
The most telling moment in the film is a throwaway line delivered in a high whine by a chic woman at a cocktail party: “I finally had an orgasm and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind.” Isaac’s (very funny) response: “Did you have the wrong kind? Really? I’ve never had the wrong kind, ever. My worst one was”—he wags his finger—“right on the money.”
Every woman watching the movie knows it’s the doctor who’s an asshole, not the woman. But that’s not how Woody/Isaac sees it.
If a woman can think, she can’t come; if she can come, she can’t think.
. . .
Just as Manhattan never authentically or fully examines the complexities of an old dude nailing a high schooler, Allen himself—an extremely well-spoken guy—is wont to become inarticulate when discussing Soon-Yi. In a 1992 interview with Walter Isaacson of Time about his then-new relationship, Allen delivered the line that became explosively famous for its fatuous dismissal of his moral shortcomings:
“The heart wants what it wants.”
It was one of those phrases that never left your head once you’d heard it; we all immediately memorized it whether we wanted to or not. Its monstrous disregard for anything but the self. Its proud irrationality. Woody goes on: “There’s no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that’s that.”
I moved on her like a bitch.
Things being what they were that summer, I had a difficult time getting through Manhattan. It took me a couple of sittings. I mentioned this difficulty on social media, this problem of watching Manhattan in the Trump moment. (I fervently hoped it was a moment.) “Manhattan is a work of genius! I am done with you, Claire!” responded a writer (older, white, male) I didn’t know personally. This was a person who had remained silent in the face of many of my more outrageous social media pronouncements, some of which involved my desire to chop up the male half of the species, Valerie Solanas–like. But the minute I confessed to having a funny feeling when I watched Manhattan—I believe I said the film made me feel “a little urpy”—this man stormed off my page, declaring himself done with me forevermore.
I had failed in what he saw as my task: the ability to overcome my own moralizing and pettifoggery—my own emotions—and do the work of appreciating genius. But who was in fact the more emotional person in this situation? He was the one storming from the virtual room.
I would have a repeat of this conversation with many men, smart and dumb, young and old, over the next months: “You must judge Manhattan on its aesthetics!” they said.
If it was hard to watch Manhattan because it was too close to Woody’s real-life creepiness, the opposite held true as well. It was virtually impossible to watch The Cosby Show because of how far beloved gruff Cliff Huxtable is from what we know about Bill Cosby.
These conversations became more heated over the next months. Maybe it just seems this way in retrospect, but there was a feeling of water pushing at the dam, until it burst in October 2017. I often think about the strange fact that it was Harvey Weinstein who brought us into this new era. It’s not like we were short on reasons to have a collective rage-fest: the Cosby trial, as I mentioned, had been going on for some time; we’d also had stories about Bertolucci, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and of course the seemingly never-ending Trump accusations.
Nothing seemed to happen, nothing seemed really to matter. But, in fact, something had to matter, and it turned out to be this: Weinstein. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the Weinstein story—a story of ongoing, systemic, repercussion-free abuse. For some reason this was the story that turned the tide. The Me Too movement had been in existence for a decade previously, founded by the Black activist Tarana Burke as a support system (largely off-line, compared to what was to come) for women who’d been through assault and sexual discrimination. After the Weinstein allegations went public, the #MeToo hashtag became widespread within a matter of days after the actress Alyssa Milano used it in a tweet. The million tweets from the night of October 7, 2017, multiplied and multiplied again. In the next weeks came the accusations against Louis C.K., Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Al Franken, and men across all industries—including my own.
I complained earlier about the way the word “we” can be used to imply or even coerce agreement. This was another way the word “we” can be used. The word “we” can be an offensive strike on shame. It can be a magnifying glass, a megaphone.
In the aftermath, people were left wondering what to do about their heroes. My lonely purview suddenly became public domain. The “do we separate the art from the artist?” field opened up to include, well, everyone.
As I wrote in my diary when I was a teen: “I don’t feel great about men right now.” I didn’t feel great about men in the fall of 2017, and a lot of other women didn’t feel great about men either. A lot of men didn’t feel great about men. Even the patriarchs were sick of patriarchy.
. . .
Not all of them, though! A male writer and I discussed Manhattan over dinner one night—at dinner in, appropriately enough, Manhattan. This writer was one of those men of letters who like to play the part, ironically but not—ties and blazers and low-key misogyny and brown alcohol in a tumbler. He always intimidated me a bit. We were dining in a cold, marble-lined, very expensive restaurant at the bottom of the Met Breuer. We were eating something more interesting than steak, something that runs or hops free through the meadows and the forests. We were basically at the pinnacle of civilization. Maybe we should’ve been more worried about our status as apex predators than what ought to be done about poor Mariel Hemingway.
I felt nervous, as if I were going to be found out. Found out as what? A woman?
Our conversation was like a little play:
Female writer: “Um, it doesn’t really hold up.”
Male writer, sharply: “What do you mean?
“Well, it all seems a tad blasé. I mean, Isaac doesn’t seem too worried she’s in high school.”
“No no no, he feels terrible about it.”
“He cracks jokes about it, but he certainly does not feel terrible, or not terrible enough.”
Male writer: “You’re just thinking about Soon-Yi—you’re letting that color the movie. I thought you were better than that.”
The male writer was in august company. I’d studied literary theory. I knew that critics have been arguing the biographical fallacy for decades—the work of the New Critics, Americans writing mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, did a lot to promulgate the idea that the work ought to be fastidiously divorced from its maker (recalling the nutty Protestant idea of sola scriptura, which asks that we treat the Bible as the sole source of all doctrine and practice—and we all know how that works out). In The Well Wrought Urn, Cleanth Brooks (possessor of the coolest name that’s ever belonged to anyone who wasn’t a blues musician) wrote that a poem ought to be considered apart from its historical—and therefore biographical—context, or at least that we ought to try to make “the closest possible examination of what the poem says as a poem.” Which makes me want to respond like the snotty thirteen-year-old I used to be: As if. A professor of mine once gave a critique of the critique, saying that the New Critical severance of work from its maker had less to do with some moral or aesthetic ideal than with the fact that these critics were scattered across the American prairies, far from the libraries of Europe, not a primary source in sight. Better, then, to make a virtue of the close reading of a work, absent knowledge of its maker’s biography and historical setting. This historically shaped ideal reading is part of why we now have dudes telling me how I ought to watch Manhattan.
But I didn’t think about that at the time. I wasn’t thinking dispassionately. Quite the opposite. I didn’t argue against the whole set-up. I didn’t stop to question who was served by insisting that biography ought not to color our experience of the film. I could feel something wrong with the construct, but I hadn’t thought about it very much, and also I’d had a martini. Instead, I sidestepped the issue. I mean, the female writer sidestepped the issue.
“I think it’s creepy on its own merits, even without knowing about Soon-Yi.”
“Get over it. You really need to judge it strictly on aesthetics.”
“So what makes it objectively aesthetically good?”
Male writer said something smart-sounding about “balance and elegance.”
There was a clink of silverware around the room, as if the knives and forks were having another conversation, a clearer and cleaner conversation, underneath or above the meaty human rumble, with its confusion of morals and aesthetics and feelings.
I wish the female writer then delivered some kind of coup de grâce, but she did not. She doubted herself.
Which of us was seeing more clearly: The one who had the ability—some might say the privilege—to remain untroubled by the filmmaker’s attitudes toward females and his history with girls? Who had the ability to watch the art without committing the biographical fallacy? Or the one who couldn’t help but notice—maybe couldn’t help but feel—the antipathies and urges that seemed to animate the project?
I’m really asking.
And were these proudly objective viewers really being as objective as they thought? Woody Allen’s usual genius is one of self-indictment, and in Manhattan he stumbles at a crucial hurdle of self-indictment, and also he fucks a teenager, and that’s the film that gets called a masterpiece?
What exactly are these guys defending? Is it the film? Or something else?
I think Manhattan and its pro-girl anti-woman story would be upsetting even if Hurricane Soon-Yi had never made landfall, but we can’t know, and there lies the very heart of the matter.
The men say they want to know why Woody Allen makes women so angry. After all, a great work of art is supposed to bring us a feeling. And yet when I say Manhattan makes me feel urpy, a man says, No, not that feeling. You’re having the wrong feeling. He speaks with authority: Manhattan is a work of genius. But who gets to say? Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the male maker, against the audience.
I noticed something: I noticed that I’m not ahistorical or immune to biography. That’s for the winners of history (men) (so far).
The thing is, I’m not saying I’m right or wrong. But I’m the audience. And I’m just acknowledging the realities of the situation: the film Manhattan is disrupted by our knowledge of Soon-Yi; but it’s also myopic and limited in its own right; and it’s also got a lot of things about it that are pretty great. All these things can be true at once. Simply being told that Allen’s history shouldn’t matter doesn’t achieve the objective of making it not matter.
I wanted to tell the story of the audience. The audience wants something to watch or read or hear. That’s what makes it an audience. And yet, as I looked around, I saw that the audience had a new job. At the particular historical moment where I found myself, a moment awash in bitter revelation, the audience had become something else: a group outraged freshly by new monsters, over and over and over. The audience thrills to the drama of denouncing the monster. The audience turns on its heel and refuses to see another Kevin Spacey film ever again.
It could be that what the audience feels in its heart is pure and righteous and true. But there might be something else going on here.
When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. We are governed by emotion, emotion around which we arrange language. The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important, and strangely exciting.
Reminder: not “you,” not “we,” but “I.” Stop sidestepping ownership. I am the audience. And I can sense there’s something entirely unacceptable lurking inside me. Even in the midst of my righteous indignation when I bitch about Woody and Soon-Yi, I know that on some level, I’m not an entirely upstanding citizen myself. In everyday deed and thought, I’m a decent-enough human. But I’m something else as well, something more objectionable. The Victorians understood this feeling; it’s why they gave us the stark bifurcations of Dorian Gray, of Jekyll and Hyde. I suppose this is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us—in me—chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in myself, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster in question.
The psychic theater of the public condemnation of monsters can be seen as a kind of elaborate misdirection: Nothing to see here. I’m no monster. Meanwhile, hey, you might want to take a closer look at that guy over there.
. . .
This impulse—to blame the other guy—is in fact a political impulse. I talked earlier about the word “we.” “We” can be an escape hatch from responsibility. It can be a megaphone. But it can also be a casting out. Us against them. The morally correct people against the immoral ones. The process of making someone else wrong so that we may be more right.
