On Sunday, January 12th, Diane Keaton accepted the Golden Globes’ Cecil B. DeMille Award on behalf of her longtime friend and collaborator, the director Woody Allen. The notoriously crotchety Allen declined to attend the awards, as he typically does—Globes viewers were instead treated to Keaton’s wobbly rendition of the Girl Scout song “Make New Friends,” an apt if odd choice with the implication being that whatever Woody’s flaws, he has remained, at least to Keaton, “gold.” Past recipients of the lifetime achievement award include Morgan Freeman, Robert DeNiro, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg; all of whom are accomplished, distinguished contributors to the cinematic arts, and none of whom have ever been accused of violating their stepdaughter(s). There’s very little question Allen deserved the award on an artistic level–but does anyone that twisted deserve it on a human one?
This question hit home for me because for the last six years I’ve been a diehard Woody Allen fan. I saw my first Allen film when I was 16–I was with my grandparents, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona was the only selection everyone could agree on. By the time the end credits rolled, I was a goner. Since then I’ve seen every film the man’s ever made, from the “early, funny stuff” (Bananas, Sleeper) to the darker episodes (Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream), to the widely lauded classics (Manhattan, Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters) and my personal favorites (Stardust Memories, Husbands and Wives, Blue Jasmine, and of course Vicky). It’s hard to find a cinematic vision quite as fully realized as Allen’s, across such a broad oeuvre of films. From the Dostoevskian dilemmas of Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point, to even the most vaguely expressed opinions about his own tastes (yes on Mahler, no on Wagner) that stretch from his earliest films to his latest, Allen’s movies are 90-minute pockets of a larger exploration into human nature–and funny to boot.
Woody Allen’s marriage to his former stepdaughter Soon-Yi Previn has become a pop culture punch line, and I thought I fully understood the dark history delicately alluded to in the articles I read about him. The marriage was common knowledge, and thinking that was it, I dismissed what I saw as puritanical kvetching over the perhaps ethically dicey choice of a dark genius. Then in November, thinking to read some illuminating anecdotes on the man whose works I so thoroughly loved, I picked up Maureen Orth’s interview with Mia Farrow for Vanity Fair, which traces the full account of the actress’s ugly separation from the director in 1991. It didn’t take me past the second paragraph to realize exactly how much I’d missed, that “In August 1992, after disappearing with Allen in Mia’s Connecticut country house and reappearing without underpants, Dylan [another of Mia’s adopted daughters] told her mother that Allen had stuck his finger up her vagina and kissed her all over in the attic, charges Allen has always vociferously denied… [and that] a babysitter testified that on the day of the alleged attic incident, while Mia was out shopping, she had come upon Allen in the TV room, kneeling, face forward, with his head in Dylan’s lap.” This was right around the same time Farrow discovered Allen’s involvement with Soon-Yi when she found nude pictures of the couple’s adopted daughter amongst the director’s belongings. There’s ‘ethically dicey’ — and then there’s deeply and unequivocally depraved.
Up until I’d read that article, I’d have said that that Allen was my favorite director. My phone case had a goofy design with his face, and meeting him when I was 19 was one of the more thrilling moments of my life. But if marrying your non-biological daughter is flirting with taboo, pedophilia is indisputably wrong on a profound and visceral level. Is it possible to reconcile the importance of an artist’s work, and the deep destruction they’ve nonetheless wrought?
This isn’t a new question; artists are very frequently assholes. Many of the greatest works that we have, the pillars of human creativity and expression, were the creations of individuals whom, without the redemptive power of their art, would be regarded as degenerates. And this inevitably puts an asterisk to the societal value of what they create; Hemingway’s alcoholism or Roman Polanski’s fondness for little girls doesn’t make us cast their works aside, but it’s at the very least a significant shadow over their legacies. Maybe there’s something intrinsic to great art that compels genesis from moral darkness–maybe the emanation of something truly original, truly meaningful can’t come from an ethically simple existence. Maybe it’s only moral darkness that can shed light on the questions that matter to us. Either way, the dichotomy of the shining value of original art, and the questionable choices of its creators, is all too frequently there.
Art is rarely devoid of meaning intrinsic to the life of the artist; but tying that meaning exclusively to biography is limiting, and diminishes the power and purpose of art. Milton was a chauvinist who terrorized his wife and daughters, but does that mean we throw out Paradise Lost? Dostoevsky was a compulsive gambler, an adulterer and an anti-Semite — so long, Crime and Punishment? We could be selective enough to reject art on the morality of its creator, if we lived in a world of Tibetan monks in which no one who ever cheated on their wives or taxes, and still happened to be able to write well, or paint a pretty picture. As long as we inhabit a morally complex–and by complex, I mean flawed–world, there will be the conundrum of a creator’s personal choices coloring his creative ones. But an idea can’t be tethered to the morality of its creator; not only by necessity, because all human beings are flawed, but because an end product can and should have meaning and purpose beyond its origin. The art that comes from these imperfect human beings is intended to outlive its creators; the hope is that these works can also outlive the wrongdoing perpetrated by them.
So Woody Allen is definitively a creep, and no matter what his artistic achievements, giving him a shiny statue with his name on it is a not-so-tacit endorsement of that.
But that doesn’t mean I’m doing anything with my well-worn and well-loved copy of Annie Hall.
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