{"id":17406,"date":"2025-02-24T15:55:28","date_gmt":"2025-02-24T15:55:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=17406"},"modified":"2025-02-24T15:55:28","modified_gmt":"2025-02-24T15:55:28","slug":"woody-and-annie-and-others-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2025\/02\/24\/woody-and-annie-and-others-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Woody and Annie (and Others) Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\"><em><strong>\u2018I wish I could think of a positive point to leave you with. Will you take two negative points?\u2019<\/strong><br \/>\n<\/em>Woody Allen, from his stand-up comedy routine (1964)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Consider the facts: French writer Annie Ernaux has an affair with a young man, thirty years her junior (she was fifty-four, he was twenty-four), and writes about it, in the recently published <em>The Young Man<\/em>. Therein, she flatly admits that she was simply using him solely for her own satisfaction, stating that she was with a younger man \u2018so that I would not continually be looking at the timeworn face of a man my age, the face of my own aging. When A.\u2019s face was before me, mine was young too. Men have known this forever, and I saw no reason to deprive myself.\u2019 Also, \u2018I felt as if I had been lying on a bed since age eighteen and never risen from it \u2013 the same bed but in different places, with different men, indistinguishable from one another.\u2019 It is hailed as disarmingly honest in reclaiming female desire \u2013 as though we did not already know that women have always had desires, and do not really need to reclaim them because they never went away. Annie Ernaux is lauded. She has won the Nobel Prize, among other prestigious awards.<\/p>\n<p>Then there is the case of North American filmmaker Woody Allen: he has an affair with a young woman, thirty-five years his junior (he was fifty-six, she was twenty-one), and despite the fact that they married five years later, and have since adopted two daughters, and been apparently happy in their union for twenty-six years and counting, he is vilified as a predatory creep and possible paedophile, constantly mentioned in the same breath as charged and\/or convicted sex-offenders Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. He now has difficulty financing his films in his own country, and has to do so abroad \u2013 notably in France. Amazon refused to distribute his 2019 film, <em>A Rainy Day in New York<\/em>, as \u2018unmarketable\u2019, resulting in a law suit for breach of contract. While some famous actors have stood by him, singing his praises, others have rushed to distance themselves from him, making clear that they regret having worked with him, and would not do so again. His memoir <em>Apropos of Nothing<\/em> was dropped by his original publisher, after protests from his ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow and some members of her family, and a staff walkout at the publishing firm, although it was subsequently taken up by another house. He has been blacklisted, or in the parlance <em>de nos jours<\/em>, \u2018cancelled\u2019. (Amusing titbit: the contribution of Allen and his wife to Hillary Clinton\u2019s 2016 Presidential campaign was unceremoniously returned. The principle of \u2018innocent until proven guilty\u2019, and the requirement of due process, seemingly does not apply in Clinton\u2019s legal framework.) This double standard needs scrutiny.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Rosita Sweetman says sexual abuse of women by powerful men is still endemic, but hails incredibly brave young women like Dylan Farrow for calling it out.<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/JMu6e02KuU\">https:\/\/t.co\/JMu6e02KuU<\/a><br \/>\n@RositaSweetman <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/WoodyAllen?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#WoodyAllen<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/Metoo?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#Metoo<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/VoicesCassandra\/status\/1791068549424820513?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">May 16, 2024<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Obviously, there are additional factors which serve to place Allen in an unfavourable light, and can be used to justify the opprobrium he endures. For one, the young woman he took up with, Soon-Yi Previn, was the adopted daughter of that ex-girlfriend, Farrow, who was still at the time his current girlfriend. For another, and far more damaging to his reputation, he was accused by Farrow, in the aftermath of the Allen\/Soon-Yi relationship becoming public knowledge in 1992, of molesting his and Farrow\u2019s adopted daughter Dylan, then aged seven, an accusation which resurfaced in 2016 in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and a 2021 HBO documentary featuring interviews with Dylan, <em>Allen v. Farrow<\/em>. In fairness, Ernaux\u2019s young paramour was a fan (a male groupie?), not an extended family member, and she has never been accused of sexually assaulting a seven-year-old boy, much less the adopted son of her then boyfriend. But, the key word in the previous sentence, to my mind, is \u2018accused\u2019. (Echoes resonate of the reflexively eponymous 1988 Jonathan Kaplan film, starring Jodie Foster, in which she portrays a rape victim who struggles to get justice. Who, exactly, was <em>The Accused<\/em>?) Allen has been accused, but never charged, much less convicted \u2013 unlike Cosby, Weinstein and Epstein.<\/p>\n<p>It is not my intention here to delve into the copious mound of facts and opinions, claims and counterclaims, which surround this case, and are readily available elsewhere to those with the inclination to do the proper research. Such an approach would involve excessive quotation from the large swathes of television, newspaper and magazine interviews, statements and op. ed. pieces I have read (to say nothing of the social media onslaughts on either side), information which has long been in the public domain. The Allen\/Farrow\/Previn blended family imbroglio is too sad and sordid and multifaceted, the problems around the original accusation too byzantine \u2013 partaking of classical tragedy \u2013 to allow of a simple black and white interpretation, and we may never know the whole story, only the conflicting, partial versions. So I will be economical with my references, but hopefully not with the truth \u2013 as I see it. The trouble with presenting an argument from either side of this dispute is that, as with the majority of such issues, once a side is taken, all arguments become one-sided. However, while I hope to avoid the bulk of the \u2018he said\/she said\u2019 discourse on this episode of the culture wars, I will allow myself the odd judgement, while trying to avoid being overly partisan. My own allegiances will soon become apparent, and in any case I have other matters to engage with here: mainly, societal attitudes to legal, large age gap relationships; and, also, the age old conundrum around the separation of the artist and the work.<\/p>\n<p>Let us pull from the pile this quote, if only because it pithily summarises the vast and seemingly endless debate around the Allen\/Farrow debacle. <span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.vulture.com\/2018\/09\/soon-yi-previn-speaks.html\">Daphne Merkin<\/a><\/span> wrote in her profile of Soon-Yi (<em>New York Magazine<\/em>\/<em>Vulture<\/em>, 17\/09\/2018):<\/p>\n<p><em>With regard to almost every aspect of life in the Farrow household, Soon-Yi\u2019s story, like those of her younger brother Moses and Allen himself, is strikingly different from what\u2019s put forth by Mia and Dylan as well as their son and brother Ronan Farrow, the journalist who has written a series of high-profile #MeToo stories over the past year. I can\u2019t pretend to know what actually occurred, of course, and neither can anyone other than Allen and Dylan. Even the judge who eventually denied Allen custody of Dylan opined that \u201cwe will probably never know what happened on August 4, 1992.\u201d All of life is filled with competing narratives, and the burden of interpretation is ultimately on the listener and his or her subjectively arrived-at sense of the truth.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>People will choose sides, based on previous loyalties and ideological standpoints, often ignoring evidence and even succumbing to flimsily substantiated conspiracy theories. (Needless to say, Merkin herself has faced multiple accusations of bias, both as a long-term acquaintance of Allen\u2019s, and as a #MeToo sceptic). Still, a few salient points, often ignored, deserve to be made in Allen\u2019s defence on both (separate, but in many minds, related) counts: that of the inappropriateness of his relationship with, and possible grooming of, his now wife (who was his then girlfriend\u2019s adopted daughter); and that of sexually assaulting his own adopted daughter.<\/p>\n<p>Allen is on record as stating that he had no serious qualms about his relationship with Soon-Yi. \u2018I didn\u2019t feel that just because she was Mia\u2019s adopted daughter, there was any great moral dilemma. It was a fact, but not one with any great import. It wasn\u2019t like she was my daughter,\u2019 he told <em>Time <\/em>magazine in an August 1992 interview. \u2018I am not Soon-Yi\u2019s father or stepfather. I\u2019ve never even lived with Mia. I never had any family dinners over there. I was not a father to her adopted kids in any sense of the word.\u2019 Supporters will concur. Detractors will see in this attitude further evidence of the man\u2019s deficient conscience, and questionable moral probity. It does seem that the romantic part of Allen\u2019s relationship with Farrow was well over by the time Soon-Yi and he got together, at least according to the Woody and Soon-Yi side of things. Allen and Farrow were maintaining a loose union mostly for the sake of the two children they had adopted, and the one biological child they had had together. In December 1987 Farrow gave birth to her and Allen\u2019s son, Satchel (now known as Ronan) Farrow. Farrow wanted to adopt another child in 1991, and Allen said he would not take \u2018a lousy attitude toward it\u2019 so long as she agreed to his adoption of Dylan and Moses, whom Farrow had already adopted by herself. In October of that year she adopted another Vietnamese child (who turned out to have disabilities Farrow could not cope with, and so was passed on to another adoptive family). Allen\u2019s adoption of Dylan and Moses was finalised in December 1991, shortly before Farrow discovered that Allen and Soon-Yi were romantically and sexually involved, in January 1992.<\/p>\n<p>Soon-Yi\u2019s version of events, and justification for them, is more or less the same as Allen\u2019s. In August 1992 she wrote, in a statement to <em>Newsweek<\/em>, that Allen had never been a father figure to her, and that they had become friendly long after his romance with Farrow had ended, <span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/soon-yi-speaks-lets-not-get-hysterical-197958\">adding<\/a><\/span>:<\/p>\n<p><em>I\u2019m not a retarded little underage flower who was raped, molested and spoiled by some evil stepfather \u2013 not by a long shot. I\u2019m a psychology major at college who fell for a man who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Mia. I admit it\u2019s offbeat, but let\u2019s not get hysterical.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This was repeated twenty-six years later, in that controversial 2018 <em>Vulture<\/em> interview with Merkin: \u2018We didn\u2019t think of him as a father. He didn\u2019t even have clothing at our house, not even a toothbrush.\u2019 She went on to say that she was \u2018madly in love\u2019 with Allen. \u2018[I was] completely attracted to him, physically and sexually. I know he\u2019d said that I\u2019d meet someone in college, but I\u2019d already decided,\u2019 she told <em>Vulture<\/em>. \u2018From the first kiss I was a goner and loved him.\u2019 As Allen and Farrow had never married, and as Allen had never adopted Soon-Yi, their relationship was not illegal. Furthermore, at twenty-one, she was more than \u2018of age\u2019. Soon-Yi\u2019s affirmations are, unsurprisingly, disparaged by the vilifiers, as the product of an impressionable young woman manipulated by her more worldly and high-profile partner, and who may even be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. This interpretation finds its equal and opposite expression on the part of Allen\u2019s advocates in the contention that Dylan was coached by Farrow into making her accusations of molestation, as the vindictive vengefulness of a woman wronged.<\/p>\n<p>However, in many ways, the propriety of Allen\u2019s relationship with Soon-Yi is a red herring, when it comes to characterising him as a sexual predator. Although it should not need to be pointed out, apparently it does: when it comes to passing judgement on Woody Allen\u2019s large age gap marriage in particular, or large age gap relationships in general, and whether or not the senior party \u2013 man or woman \u2013 is de facto creepy, Allen\u2019s status as an accused (but, more importantly, uncharged and unconvicted) child molester is simply irrelevant, if only because paedophilia (defined as a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children), hebephilia (a primary or exclusive sexual interest in eleven to fourteen-year-old pubescents) and ephebophilia (a primary sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages fifteen to nineteen) are very distinct, not necessarily overlapping, preferences, with the later not considered by mental health professionals to be pathological. Twenty-one-year-old women are not seven-year-old girls. In other words, it would be entirely possible that Allen could have groomed Soon-Yi as an adolescent but not molested Dylan; and, vice versa, he could possibly have molested Dylan while not ever have been grooming Soon-Yi. One act would not substantiate the other. In addition, it is just as likely that neither act took place as that both did.<\/p>\n<p>Paedophilia itself is a compulsive behaviour: you do not suddenly start acting on paedophiliac impulses when you are fifty-seven-years old. Indeed, clinicians differentiate between paedophiles and child molesters, and \u2018preferential\u2019 and \u2018situational\u2019 child abuse, since not all of those with a sexual preference for prepubescents molest children, and not all child molesters are true paedophiles. There are motives for child sexual abuse that are unrelated to paedophilia, such as marital problems, the unavailability of an adult partner, or general anti-social tendencies \u2013 which does not, of course, mean that everyone who finds themselves in such situations is going to abuse children. Furthermore, paedophilia is a prenatal, genetic sexual orientation: people are born that way, rather like being born straight, gay, bi or trans. For this reason, there is no evidence that paedophilia can be cured. Such an endeavour would be a little like trying to \u2018cure\u2019 homosexuality through aversion therapy, one of the more shameful practices of the many to be found in the history of psychiatry. Instead, most therapies focus on treating paedophiles so that they refrain from acting on their desires. However, in the wider society, just as there was once no understanding, or at best condescension, for LGBTQ+ people or unmarried mothers (the phrase \u2018single parent family\u2019 had not even entered the lexicon), now there is none for paedophiles \u2013 only judgement and condemnation. Every generation needs a minority to hate on, even if it is demonstrably true that paedophiles do more harm to the vulnerable than LGBTQ+ or unwed Mums ever did. Remember: there was a time, not so long ago, when gay people were routinely considered to be a bunch of pederasts, and unmarried pregnant females were thought of as lascivious \u2018fallen\u2019 women, whose \u2018innocence\u2019 had been taken, or who had given it up too easily. Magdalen laundries were full of them.<\/p>\n<p>Allen had no previous record of sexual activity with children (which does not, of course, mean that it did not happen \u2013 nor would it be of much consolation to Dylan, if her accusations against Allen are true). Various studies have indicated that non-paedophilic offenders do tend to do so at times of high stress, have a later onset of offending, and have fewer, often familial, victims; while paedophilic offenders frequently start offending at an early age, have a larger number of victims who are more often than not extrafamilial, and are more driven to offend. Such classifications and terminology may be irrelevant to victims, but while the possibility that Allen is a very late onset, single incidence child molester remains, it is unlikely that he is a paedophile. His numerous relationships with adult, so called \u2018age appropriate\u2019 women would also militate against this diagnosis.<\/p>\n<p>For those unfamiliar with the bare facts, Allen was accused of one incident of molestation of a seven-year-old by the child\u2019s adoptive mother, against the backdrop of the revelation of his legal relationship with another adoptive daughter of the seven-year-old\u2019s adoptive mother, and the ensuing custody battle between him and the child\u2019s mother for custody of the seven-year-old adopted daughter, and two other children, one adopted and one biological. He was investigated in two separate states, Connecticut and New York, and cleared in both. These investigations included both physical and psychological examinations of Dylan, and lie detector tests taken by Allen, which he passed. The Connecticut State\u2019s Attorney did not press charges. During the investigation the Connecticut State Police referred Dylan to the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale\u2013New Haven Hospital, which concluded that Allen had not sexually abused Dylan, and that the allegation was probably coached or influenced by Mia Farrow. After a fourteen month long inquiry, the New York Department of Social Services found \u2018no credible evidence\u2019 to support the allegation. Furthermore, Farrow\u2019s legal representatives offered Allen the opportunity to have the abuse allegation remain private, in exchange for a huge payout to Farrow in compensation and child maintenance, which he refused. This hardly points to his having any sense of guilt, or an overriding desire to preserve his reputation.<\/p>\n<p>But then come the speculative caveats: the state attorney in Connecticut found \u2018probable cause\u2019 to prosecute, but decided against doing so because it would further traumatise Dylan, and because there was \u2018reasonable doubt\u2019 that a conviction was a certain outcome, as it had been impossible to reach the conclusion that the abuse had occurred. One of the social workers in the New York investigation was fired and replaced because he was in favour of charging Allen. I find this latter claim, with its implication that Allen was too powerful a figure in the U.S. film industry to face the full rigors of the law, what with his having many sympathetic friends, and having brought millions in revenue into New York City, vaguely ridiculous: if Harvey Weinstein, a much more powerful presence in the U.S. film industry, can be charged and convicted, then Woody Allen certainly can. If it was so easy for rich and powerful men to act with impunity and evade the justice system, then why are Weinstein and Cosby serving prison sentences, and why was Jeffrey Epstein in prison on remand (when he committed suicide), while Woody Allen is not? As regards Allen\u2019s rejection of Farrow\u2019s lawyers\u2019 attempt at mediation, which involved financial payments in exchange for making the charge go away, his antagonists might argue that this was only because Allen did not want to be lumbered with paying out such a large sum of money to Farrow in what he considered to be an extortionate deal. Again, your explanations will tend to be determined by which side you have already taken.<\/p>\n<p>The opposition between Allen supporters who claim that Farrow coached and cajoled Dylan, and the Farrow supporters who claim that Allen groomed and manipulated Soon-Yi, sadly extends into the Farrow family itself. Moses Farrow, who was fourteen at the time of the accusations, and is today a forty-six-year-old psychotherapist, staunchly supports Woody and Soon-Yi. In a long blog post from May 2018 titled \u2018A Son Speaks Out\u2019, he makes detailed claims about how Mia tyrannised him into upholding her version of events, how Mia coached Dylan during the videotaped interview she did with her, and that initially taking Mia\u2019s side before coming out against her when he was an adult (and therefore no longer financially dependent on her) was \u2018the biggest regret of my life.\u2019 On the other hand, Ronan (formerly Satchel) Farrow, aged four at the time and today a thirty-seven-year-old investigative journalist, staunchly supports Mia and Dylan. He continues to campaign against Allen, both in mainstream media outlets and on social media. On one side, Soon-Yi and Moses paint a picture of Mia Farrow as mercurial, violent and manipulative, given to outbursts of rage and cruel punishments, and the instigator of Dylan\u2019s allegations against Woody, as revenge for his affair with Soon-Yi. On the other side, Dylan and Ronan defend their mother against attacks while continuing to assert that Woody molested Dylan.<\/p>\n<p>What those who take sides in the Farrow family feud generally do not take into account is that even if Mia was an abusive, controlling, bad mother, it is still conceivable that Woody Allen molested Dylan Farrow. One possibility does not negate the other. It just adds to the sadness. Equally, just because Woody Allen began an affair and since married a woman thirty-five years younger than him, who was his then partner\u2019s adopted daughter, it does not automatically make him a paedophile, a molester, or even a groomer. A further strand in this tangled web is the possibility that Soon-Yi Previn could have been exacting a subtle form of revenge on her adoptive mother Mia Farrow, consciously or unconsciously, for what she perceives was an abusive childhood, by \u2018stealing\u2019 her boyfriend. What is clear, however, is that there is a marked difference between the accounts and outcomes of Farrow\u2019s biological and\/or Caucasian children, and those of her adopted and\/or Asian ones, and the sides they have subsequently taken. So maybe she did play favourites, as many parents do, with undertones of racism.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/archive.nytimes.com\/kristof.blogs.nytimes.com\/2014\/02\/01\/an-open-letter-from-dylan-farrow\/\">\u2018What\u2019s your favourite Woody Allen movie?\u2019<\/a><\/span> So begins Dylan Farrow\u2019s open letter to the <em>New York Times<\/em> of 01\/02\/2014, in which she reiterated her accusation of molestation by Allen. There has emerged a line of argument which attempts to find evidence of his grooming of Soon-Yi and \u2013\u00a0 bizarrely \u2013 his molestation of Dylan, in Allen\u2019s inappropriate interest in teenage girls as displayed in his film work. While reference is made to a few snippets scattered throughout the oeuvre, such as when Rob, the friend of Allen\u2019s Alvy Singer in <em>Annie Hall<\/em> (1977), in recounting an escapade in Los Angeles, declares, \u2018Twins, Max! Sixteen years old. Can you imagine the mathematical possibilities?\u2019, the chief culprit is the entirety of Allen\u2019s 1979 movie, <em>Manhattan<\/em>, with its central storyline of a relationship between forty-two-year-old television comedy writer Isaac Davis (played by Allen) and seventeen-year-old high school student Tracy (played by Mariel Hemingway).<\/p>\n<p>Revisiting <em>Manhattan<\/em> forty-five years later, what is striking now is not only how all the other adult characters in the film are totally accepting of the couple in their social circle (save for a solitary \u00a0throwaway quip by Ike\u2019s other love interest, Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton): \u2018somewhere Nabokov is smiling\u2019), regarding it as at worst an eccentric but charming peccadillo, but also how garlanded with praise from both audiences and critics, as well as awards, the film was at the time of its release. Even as late as October 2013, <em>Guardian<\/em> readers were voting it the best film directed by Woody Allen. Clearly, <em>Manhattan<\/em>\u2019s portrayal of a middle-aged man dating a teenager drew little derision back then, with the sole dissenting voice on record being that of Pauline Kael, who wrote in her <em>New York Times<\/em> review: \u2018What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?\u2019 What viewers and so-called critics frequently do not realise about <em>Annie Hall<\/em> is that, despite the fact that it is narrated by the Woody stand-in Alvy, it is actually about a developing female artist (whose name gives the film its title) who outgrows an immature male partner. Similarly, with <em>Manhattan<\/em>, it is Tracy who imparts important life lessons to Ike, such as the closing advice \u2018you have to have a little faith in people\u2019. <em>Manhattan<\/em> only began to attract more negative analysis in the late 2010s, as Allen\u2019s reputation again came into question after the rise of the #MeToo movement, and Dylan\u2019s reiterated allegations. Societal attitudes have changed, but only relatively recently.<\/p>\n<p>As even those who find Allen suspect or downright creepy will have to admit, <em>Manhattan<\/em> came out at a particular point in history (which was pretty much most of history up to and surpassing that particular point) where the kind of relationship portrayed in the film seemed unobjectionable to many adults (male and female). Take, for example, the character of Randal P. McMurphy in Ken Kesey\u2019s novel <em>One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest<\/em> (1962): feigning mental illness, McMurphy is transferred from a prison work farm to a psychiatric facility because he thinks it will be an easier way to serve out his six month sentence. His crimes? \u2018Drunkenness, Assault and Battery, Disturbing the Peace, <em>repeated<\/em> gambling, and one arrest for\u2026\u2019 Statutory Rape. He was never convicted, as the fifteen-year-old girl chose not to testify, possibly due to intimidation. However, McMurphy claims that the girl, \u2018Said she was seventeen, Doc, and she was plenty willin\u2019.\u2019, and that her insatiable sexual appetite made him take \u2018to sewing my pants shut.\u2019 He continues his own defence by arguing that he was forced to leave town after the trial because, \u2018that little hustler would of actually burnt me to a frazzle by the time she reached legal sixteen.\u2019 The subsequent filmisation by Milo\u0161 Forman, released in 1975, is even more openly condoning of McMurphy\u2019s sexual history (and readers who are easily triggered should consider themselves warned that perhaps it would be in their best interests to skip over this excerpt from McMurphy\u2019s interview with the good Dr. Spivey):<\/p>\n<p><em>She was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and she told me she was eighteen, she was very willing, I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of you, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s crazy at all and I don\u2019t think you do either. No man alive could resist that, and that\u2019s why I got into jail to begin with. And now they\u2019re telling me I\u2019m crazy over here because I don\u2019t sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don\u2019t make a bit of sense to me. If that\u2019s what being crazy is, then I\u2019m senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that\u2019s it.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Presumably, Kesey as author, followed thirteen years later by scriptwriters Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, thought that this crime was an acceptable one for a protagonist \u2013 whose status as a Christ-like figure is subtly alluded to throughout the narrative \u2013 to commit, and still remain a \u2018good guy\u2019, or even a secular redemptive saviour of sorts, however flawed. The reading and film audiences were in accord \u2013 if they thought about it at all \u2013 given the massive contemporary popularity of the book and film. Interestingly, Ryan Gilbey\u2019s reassessment in the <em>New Statesman<\/em> on the occasion of the film\u2019s re-release in 2017 appeared under the headline: \u2018Watching <em>One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest<\/em> again, I feel sorry for Nurse Ratched\u2019, the character previously seen as the story\u2019s arch villainess.<\/p>\n<p>But Tracy in <em>Manhattan<\/em> was not underage \u2018jailbait\u2019, to use the colloquial term for the temptation of sexual relations with minors. The age of consent in New York state was seventeen in 1979, and remains so today. (As of April 2021, of the fifty U.S. states, thirty have an age of consent of sixteen, nine at seventeen, and in eleven states the age is eighteen.) Thus, there is nothing illegal about Ike and Tracy\u2019s relationship, as she is deemed capable of giving consent to sex with anyone else over the age of seventeen (save for cases of incest), with no so-called \u2018Romeo and Juliet\u2019 rules governing the age of her partner(s). Whether or not that represents informed consent is a matter for the legislature. (As we know from the political sphere, consent can be manufactured.) I would suggest that if the majority of a given society is of the opinion that a sexual relationship between a forty-two-year old and seventeen-year-old, or the portrayal thereof, is inappropriate, reprehensible, or criminal, then it is the current law which now needs to be changed, not the filmmaker or his work, retrospectively. After all, you cannot be indicted for a crime now that was not a crime then \u2013 in fiction or in reality. Well, maybe in fiction.<\/p>\n<p>Was Vladimir Nabokov a predatory, manipulative man because he wrote a novel about a predatory, manipulative man? Hardly, although Martin Amis, who averred \u2018I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius\u2019 (in \u2018The Problem with Nabokov\u2019, <em>The Guardian<\/em>, 14\/11\/2009), cannot help but have queasy reservations about what he perceives as the \u2018only significant embarrassment\u2019 in the literary reputation of one of his writerly heroes, opining (in \u2018Divine Levity\u2019, <em>Times Literary Supplement<\/em>, 23\/12\/2011): \u2018Of the nineteen fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly concern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls . . . To be as clear as one can be: the unignorable infestation of nymphets in Nabokov is not a matter of morality; it is a matter of aesthetics. There are just too many of them.\u2019 What if Nabokov had been accused of sexual impropriety (as could happen to anyone, for a variety of reasons, especially those burdened with teaching fickle, entitled students in the humanities departments of universities, in order to earn a living), would the facts that he had written <em>Lolita<\/em> and that paedophilia features in five of his other novels have been held in evidence against him? Was Nabokov a creep because he wrote about creeps \u2013 at length? Doubtless, there are millennials who would like to see <em>Lolita<\/em> banned, just as there were Moral Majority types who wanted it censored when it was published in 1955 (by the Olympia Press in Paris, for fear of backlash in the Anglophone world). Senior publisher Dan Franklin has gone on record stating that he would not publish <em>Lolita<\/em> today, for fear \u2018a committee of 30-year-olds\u2019 would resign in protest because of #MeToo and social media.<\/p>\n<p>Granted, it is disingenuous to conflate opposition to abuse and harassment with unreconstructed Judeo-Christian prudishness about sex. But it still amounts to arguing that there are facets of human behaviour that are out of bounds for nuanced exploration by artists and writers. We have exchanged the rationale for the puritanism of one era for that of another \u2013 however well-intentioned both of them were and are. Lewis Carroll obsessed about a prepubescent girl in <em>Alice in Wonderland<\/em> and <em>Alice Through the Looking Glass<\/em>. Father\/Daughter incest is a major theme in James Joyce\u2019s <em>Finnegans Wake<\/em>. From <em>Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em> to <em>Bleeding Edge<\/em>, via <em>Mason &amp; Dixon<\/em> and <em>Against The Day<\/em>, incest and paedophilia run like a fault line through the work of Thomas Pynchon. In these days of sensitivity readers, should we ban them all? Should they come with a health warming? If we accept that paedophilia and incest and sexual abuse of children in general are things in the real world, and that they are immoral, where does that put the morality of writing about the topics or choosing not to, or passing laws to outlaw or censor such material? Does choosing not to publish facilitate covering them up? Does choosing to do so serve in tacitly promoting them? Such writing is deeply discomfiting, as it was probably intended to be. You would probably not be well-adjusted if you did not find it so. One thinks of Judge John Munro Woolsey, who concluded in the New York trial of Joyce\u2019s <em>Ulysses<\/em> for obscenity in 1933 that, \u2018Whilst in many places the effect of <em>Ulysses<\/em> on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.\u2019 But did the good judge not suspect that the novel\u2019s power as an emetic was in some ways dependent on its being aphrodisiac? Does it not all depend on point-of-view and direction of sympathies, both within and without the texts? And, if so, who is to decide what the point-of-view, and direction of sympathies, are? Who will judge the judges? But if you are really looking for a book to censor because of depictions of rape and incest, then why not start with the Bible?<\/p>\n<p>There is a large age gap relationship in Sophia Coppola\u2019s film <em>Lost In Translation<\/em> (2003), which remains unconsummated. The precise disparity itself is left unspecified, but Scarlett Johansson was seventeen when she played the role of Charlotte, a recent Yale philosophy graduate in her early twenties, and Bill Murray was fifty-two when he took on the character of Bob Harris, a faded actor in his early fifties. That the mutual attraction is romantic in nature is made clear by the significant show of disappointment exhibited by Charlotte when Bob has a fling with a more age appropriate woman (equally adulterous, but that transgression is not the focus of our moral inquiry here). In her rather vanilla defence of her storyline, in an interview given as part of the twentieth anniversary of the film\u2019s release, Coppola stated:<\/p>\n<p><em>Part of the story is about how you can have romantic connections that aren\u2019t sexual or physical. You can have crushes on people where it isn\u2019t that kind of thing. Part of the idea was that you can have connections where you can\u2019t be together for various reasons because you\u2019re at different points in life.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>But what if it had turned sexual? Would Bob have suddenly metamorphosised into a predatory creep? Certainly, certain sections of the commentariat would have it so. They even express misgivings about the relationship portrayed as it stands. It is unlikely that what is widely regarded as a Gen X cinema classic would garner such a warm reception were it released today, given the heightened awareness of gendered power imbalances in the movie business, and elsewhere. The film assuredly benefitted greatly from being released before online discourse consumed pop culture, as it would easily have fallen foul of debates about the ethics of age gap relationships if it came out in the age of X (formerly Twitter). Furthermore, what if it had been made by a man? What if it had been made by Woody Allen?<\/p>\n<p>I notice that I myself have now fallen into the trap of failing to distinguish between legal and illegal sexual activity. But perhaps that is because there is a large cohort of people who are of the opinion that associations which are currently legal ought to be illegal. And if that were to happen, such currently legal relationships would become much less common in fictional representations, as it would become much less of a burning issue, although not in the realms of fantasy fiction. The queasiness of taboo which applied to <em>Lolita<\/em> in its day would now apply to <em>Manhattan<\/em> \u2013 as, indeed, it already does, but with much greater force, as now both scenarios would be equally illicit. And what would be the fate of future attempts at such representations?<\/p>\n<p>The fact is, just as Annie Ernaux was attracted to a man thirty years her junior, older men have always been attracted to women much younger than themselves, for the very reasons Ernaux says motivated her in her attraction to a much younger man. This is entirely understandable, whether you are a man or a woman: after all, youth is beautiful and full of promise; age is ragged and full of compromise. Was Ernaux grooming and being manipulative? Probably not, as it was her lover who first wrote to her, although she may have taken advantage of his fandom to have her way with him. But that was just \u2018reclaiming female desire\u2019. Nor has she been the only one engaged in this pursuit. When it comes to writers, a nefarious bunch to be sure, consider this: Iris Mudoch had a (legal) affair with a student when she was forty-four and he was twenty-four; Angela Carter had a (legal) affair with a nineteen-year-old man when she was thirty-one; and Germaine Greer published a book entitled <em>The Boy<\/em> (2003) \u2013 a study of the youthful male face and form from antiquity to the present day \u2013 in which she wrote that the ideally attractive boy must be \u2018old enough to be capable of sexual response but not yet old enough to shave. This window of opportunity is not only narrow, it is mostly illegal.\u2019 The erotic reawakening of middle-aged and older women is the main theme of several recently published novels: in Susan Minot\u2019s <em>Don\u2019t Be A Stranger<\/em> (2024), Ivy Cooper is in her early fifties, while her love interest Ansel is twenty years younger; in Miranda July\u2019s <em>All Fours<\/em> (2024), the nameless heroine is forty-five-years-old, and constantly fantasises about sex with whomever; and Julia May Jonas\u2019s <em>Vladimir<\/em> (2022) (a sly nod to Nabokov), features an unnamed fifty-eight-year-old academic, whose husband has been accused of historic sexual misconduct with seven \u2018of age\u2019 students, lusting after a forty-year-old colleague. (Parenthetically, Anne Enright\u2019s excellent early short story \u2018Felix\u2019 riffs, both stylistically and thematically, on a female Humbert Humbert, a forty-seven-year-old suburban housewife who has an affair with her teenage daughter\u2019s boyfriend.)<\/p>\n<p>In the cinema world, the mother-of-all-cougars is the Simon and Garfunkel serenaded Mrs. Robinson, the older woman who seduces and has an affair with Benjamin Braddock in Mike Nichols\u2019 <em>The Graduate<\/em> (1967). A then thirty-five-year-old Anne Bancroft was playing a woman whose age, although unspecified, was at least ten years older than that, somewhere in her forties, which is a sharp reminder of Hollywood\u2019s standards when it comes to roles for leading actresses (or \u2018female actors\u2019). As the twenty-one-year-old Benjamin, twenty-nine-year-old Dustin Hoffman was in reality only six year younger than Bancroft. (Interestingly, the film also contains a false rape accusation, made by Mrs. Robinson against Ben, in order to thwart his relationship with her daughter, Elaine (Katherine Ross)). The older-woman-younger-boy trope later appears in Richard Eyre\u2019s <em>Notes on a Scandal<\/em> (2006), itself adapted from the 2003 novel by Zo\u00eb Heller. The scandal in question concerns forty-one-year-old art teacher and mother of two Sheba Hart, who has an affair with one of her underage secondary school students, fifteen-year-old Steven Connolly. Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s <em>Liquorice Pizza<\/em> (2021) is a contemporary film depicting a twenty-five-year-old woman, photographer\u2019s assistant Alana Kane, dating a fifteen-year-old boy, actor Gary Valentine. Todd Haynes\u2019 <em>May December<\/em> (2023) features Gracie Atherton-Yoo and her husband Joe Yoo, who started a relationship in the 1990s, when she was a thirty-six-year-old mother of two and he was twelve. Gracie has spent time in jail for statuary rape, where she gave birth to Joe\u2019s baby. When she was freed on parole they got married, had two more children, and are still together. The scenario is loosely based on the real life story of Seattle teacher and mother of four Mary Kay Letourneau who, aged thirty-four in 1996, seduced her twelve-year-old student, Vili Fualaau. Like Gracie, Letourneau spent several years in prison, and married a then of age Fualaau upon her release in 2005, and had two children with him. In Halina Reijn\u2019s <em>Babygirl<\/em> (2024), CEO Romy (Nicole Kidman), a married mother of two daughters, embarks on a powerplay affair with her intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). While how old they are is not specifically detailed in dialogue, the official screenplay indicates that their respective ages are forty-nine and twenty-five, a twenty-four year disparity. Furthermore, Kidman is fifty-seven while Dickinson is twenty-eight, making the leads\u2019 real life age gap one of twenty-nine years. (As it happens, Kidman is no stranger to taking on such roles, as she portrayed similar older women involved with younger men in <em>A Family Affair<\/em> (2024), <em>The Paperboy<\/em> (2012) and <em>To Die For<\/em> (1995).) Reijn has promoted her film thus:<\/p>\n<p><em>If we see a movie where the male actor is the same age as the female actor, we find that odd. Which is insane. It should completely be normalized that the age gaps switch and that women have different relationships. We\u2019re not trapped in a box anymore. We internalize the male gaze, we internalize patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It\u2019s really hard.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In real life, Madonna is sixty-five, her boyfriend is twenty-seven. Cher is seventy-seven, her boyfriend is thirty-five. Brigitte Macron is seventy-one, her husband Emmanuel Macron is forty-seven. Some of these relationships are legal, some are not, while some inhabit a grey area, depending on where and when they occur. But the middle-aged ladies are evidently horny for young male flesh, at least in these zeitgeisty cultural representations. The message is clear: having a toy boy is cool, whereas having a younger woman, it would seem, is not \u2013 or not anymore. What men have always known, and women are catching on to, to echo Ernaux, is that connubial domesticity is often a burdensome bore from which respite is required. Thus, for men, the acquiring of a mistress, or the discreet visits to the brothel, to supplement the mundane or meagre mollifications of the marriage bed. So, either women are just catching up and this is only equality in action, or else no older person, man or woman, should be allowed to cultivate such intergenerational romantic or sexual relationships in the first place. After all, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander \u2013 or is it the other way around?<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/uncategorized\/woody-and-annie-and-others-part-ii\/\"><em><strong>CLICK HERE to read PART II of Desmond Traynor&#8217;s &#8216;Woody and Annie (and Others)&#8217;.<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Feature Image: G1AWGP Cannes, France. 12th May, 2016. Woody Allen, Soon Yi Previn Director And Wife Cafe Society, Premiere. 69 Th Cannes Film Festival Cannes, France 12 May 2016 Diw88737 Credit: Allstar Picture Library\/Alamy Live News<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2018I wish I could think of a positive point to leave you with. Will you take two negative points?\u2019 Woody Allen, from his stand-up comedy routine (1964) Consider the facts: French writer Annie Ernaux has an affair with a young man, thirty years her junior (she was fifty-four, he was twenty-four), and writes about it, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":17408,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[501,571,572,1368,1374,1488,2104,2432,4130,5613,6917,6990,8528,8529,8530,8531,9886,9888,10178,10182,10183,10186,10187,10188],"class_list":["post-17406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-and","tag-annie","tag-annie-ernaux","tag-cassandra-voices-culture","tag-cassandra-voices-desmond-traynor","tag-cassandra-voices-woody-allen","tag-culture","tag-desmond-traynor","tag-hollywood-controversies-woody-allen","tag-lolita","tag-others","tag-part","tag-soon-yi-previn","tag-soon-yi-previn-and-woody-allen-history","tag-soon-yi-previn-biography","tag-soon-yi-previn-woody-allen-marriage-details","tag-vladimir-nabokov","tag-vladimir-nabokov-lolita","tag-woody","tag-woody-allen-family-controversy","tag-woody-allen-marriage","tag-woody-allen-personal-life","tag-woody-allen-scandals","tag-woody-allen-soon-yi-previn-relationship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}