Hysteria

The same can be said about Allen’s movies, whatever the truth may be about his alleged misdeeds. It is no secret that Allen finds young women attractive; his current wife was not yet 20 when he started an affair with her. She was also the adopted daughter of Allen’s partner at the time. One of Allen’s best known and most successful films, “Manhattan,” released in 1979, when he was in his forties, featured a relationship between a middle-aged man (Allen) and a young girl, played by Mariel Hemingway, who was 16 at the time of filming.

These relationships were unconventional. Some might find them creepy. But this is not the same as molesting a child. Nor is there anything in “Manhattan,” or any other film by Allen, that reveals any interest in assaulting young children. This would be the case even if everything alleged against the director were true.

Again, morality is not irrelevant. It is hard to imagine admiring art that espouses child abuse, racial hatred, or torture (even though this seems to get people much less agitated than sexual content). But just as we should not condemn a work of art because of the artist’s private behavior, we should also be careful about applying norms of social respectability to artistic expression. Some art is meant to provoke, transgress, and push boundaries. People can do things in works of imagination that they would never do in life.--IB

The times they are a-changin' into an hysterical anti-intellectualism. I find it sickening.  Woody Allen, for example, is a rare goddamn national treasure, and the moralists would love to destroy him--liberals and conservatives alike, for different reasons, but with the same effect.

This is a well-reasoned article, rare in itself in an age of new, heightened repression.  It is not a coincidence that our present government in the U.S. is such a comatose and fraudulent disaster.


TS