Our Woody Allen Problem

“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen famously said in August 1992, at the zenith of the scandal frenzy that erupted when the public learned that the celebrated comedian and director—acclaimed for iconic, Oscar-winning movies like Annie Hall (1977) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)—had ended his 12-year relationship with actress Mia Farrow in the ugliest possible way: a secret affair with Farrow’s 18-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, apparently exposed when Farrow discovered nude pictures of the girl in Allen’s apartment. “There’s no logic to those things,” Allen told TIME’s Walter Isaacson. “You meet someone and you fall in love and that’s that.”

That’s that. Allen, who turns 80 in December, has been married to Previn for 17 years, making it the longest of his three marriages. Their two adopted daughters are teenagers. And this summer, 50 years after the release of his first feature film as a director, What’s New Pussycat?, he premiered his 45th, Irrational Man. These landmarks have sparked fresh interest in this exceedingly complex figure.

Allen’s cinematic career survived the tumult of a quarter-century ago. The consistently high caliber of his work has allowed him to maintain his stature as one of the country’s great filmmakers. But the moral taint has never fully dissipated, in large part because Allen has never conceded how dramatically the origin of his relationship with Previn differed from that of most romantic couplings, even by the generous standards of celebrity matches. His transgressions—against his ex-lover, her children, and the social fabric—were broader and more acute.

The Artist and The Man

There is a grand lineage of great artists, from Benvenuto Cellini to Richard Wagner, who have forced us to confront the paradox of l’homme vs. l’ouevre—that uncomfortable situation when life and work stand locked in moral conflict.

Among contemporary artists, Allen may trigger even greater cognitive dissonance, due to his indelible onscreen persona as a lovable schlemiel and the moral themes and psychological acuity that pervade his work. Allen’s early material was never far removed from the cruelty and horrors of World War II, and his later films brim with keen observations on human relations; all the more disturbing, then, to see the man appear to treat the people around him so callously, as an ensemble of characters easily recast or written out of his script altogether.

Yet Allen has remained defiant in interviews and in testimony during his epic child-custody battle with Farrow. Broken-hearted fans who had long cherished the Allen weltanschauung simply couldn’t believe that this genius could not readily understand that when the heart wants something it shouldn’t, especially if it will inflict pain on those closest to us, we tell the heart “no.” The most nagging and troubling notion is that his cognitive dissonance—his gift for creating fully realized human characters coupled with his own seeming lack of human character—has somehow fueled his achievement.

For his part, this stylized sculptor of words and pictures has demanded that his audience accept his version of messy facts, in which his relationship with Soon-Yi is no problem at all. From that same TIME interview with Isaacson:

ISAACSON: How could you get involved with someone who was almost a daughter?

ALLEN: I am not Soon-Yi’s father or stepfather. I’ve never even lived with Mia. I’ve never in my entire life slept at Mia’s apartment, and I never even used to go over there until my children came along seven years ago. I never had any family dinners over there. I was not a father to her adopted kids in any sense of the word.

ISAACSON: But wasn’t it breaking many bonds of trust to become involved with your lover’s daughter?

ALLEN: There’s no downside to it. The only thing unusual is that she’s Mia’s daughter. But she’s an adopted daughter and a grown woman. I could have met her at a party or something.

No downside. We should perhaps remember that Allen was, as a child, a practitioner of magic and card tricks, and, later, a creator of similarly entrancing cinematic visions. Only then can we understand how readily the auteur behind The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)—in which a Depression-era waitress, menaced by her loutish husband, is comforted by a lover who literally leaps off a matinee screen and into her arms—could, amid the self-inflicted complexities of his personal life, project himself into a reality in which he “could have” met Soon-Yi in a context unrelated to Mia Farrow and her other children.

Slings and Allegations

On the spectrum of transgressions by great artists, where do Allen’s fall, and should the longevity and apparent success of his marriage be mitigating factors in our judgment? Others have faced allegations which, if true, would represent transgressions far more serious—the acts of child molestation imputed to, and denied by, the late Michael Jackson; the drugging and raping of multiple women imputed to, and contested by, Bill Cosby; and the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl that Roman Polanski still maintains was “consensual.” Allen’s genuinely consensual relationship, albeit with the adopted daughter of his longtime lover, may be deeply troubling, but it is not criminal.

Yet the business of being a late-career Woody Allen fan is made even more complicated by the claims of child molestation Mia Farrow and her family have leveled against him since 1992. These allegations got a fresh public hearing in 2014, when, shortly after Allen was presented a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes, the New York Times published a scathing open letter on its op-ed page from the alleged victim, Dylan Farrow, about her childhood with Allen—her first public comment on the case. While partisans on both sides remain steadfast in their version of events, here the untidy evidence appears to be on Allen’s side. In a sworn statement issued in April 1993, John M. Leventhal, head of a Yale–New Haven Hospital team that spent six months investigating the charges, discounted them in full, saying medical examinations found no evidence and that young Dylan’s account—a choppy statement made with Farrow’s assistance and videotape editing—“had a rehearsed quality.” “We had two hypotheses,” Leventhal testified. “One, that these were statements made by an emotionally disturbed child and then became fixed in her mind. And the other...that she was coached or influenced by her mother.”

With this complicated record in mind, we cognitively subdivide Allen into more categories than the careers of most great artists typically demand: There is the towering neurotic genius who evolved from gag writer to stand-up comic, author, and, most prominently, creator of complex films that chronicle our times. There is the extraordinarily selfish and unrepentant man, giver to his heart of whatever it wants, and whenever it wants it, consequences be damned. And there is the apparently wronged public figure, target of the worst kind of reputational smear.

I still love the artist. Less of-the-moment than his past works and less likely to include himself as a lead player, Allen’s recent movies do not command the attention they once did; but the varied work of his prime, staged across a variety of platforms over three decades starting in 1965, still delights and tugs at my heart. Growing up Jewish with glasses in 1970s New York, I venerated Allen. Here was a hilarious comedian, intellectual in bent but also given to arresting non sequiturs and calamitous slapstick; a gifted and innovative filmmaker and pioneer of new technologies like the morphing effect in Zelig (1982); and, most important, a resilient, irrepressibly Jewish voice just a generation after the Holocaust.

The Neurotic And His Legacy

This skinny, bespectacled, and somehow cute Brooklyn Jew, an urban-neurotic koala bear, improbably made the cover of TIME in 1972, at a time when casual anti-Semitism was only beginning to recede from American public life. He did not shrink from his Jewishness nor from the global ugliness of his childhood years; rather, he incorporated both. In his movies, Allen allowed himself to be physically menaced in ways that recalled the Nazis and their victims—in Take the Money and Run (1969), for example, nearly everyone his character encounters, beginning in childhood and including even a presiding judge, smashes Allen’s eyeglasses beneath their feet. And his shtick often made explicit reference to the Final Solution, as when he cited in his stand-up act his wife’s preparation of “Nazi recipes” like “Chicken Himmler.”

Allen’s early and always winning appearances on The Dick Cavett Show and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, redoubts of mainstream American WASP cool, likewise represented a triumph for postwar American Jews. In the resurrection of Jewish culture and thought after the Shoah, Allen’s voice was at least as important to my generation as Primo Levi’s or Elie Wiesel’s, his permeation into American, and even world, consciousness arguably wider and deeper. Just 12 years after Alvy Singer courted Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall in spite of his Otherness, Jerry Seinfeld plausibly embodied The Everyman in a top-rated sitcom. This was a measure of Allen’s success in changing American perceptions of leading men.

The achievements that made Allen such a revolutionary figure make it correspondingly difficult to remain a fan post-Soon-Yi. One recalls the joke Alvy Singer relates to the camera at the end of Annie Hall: “This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ And, uh, the doctor says, ‘Well, why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’”

Like that patient considering his lycanthropic brother, we recognize in Allen both the need for radical intervention and the undeniable fruits of radical self-invention. And we can also imagine that long after their deeply flawed deliverer is gone, his treasured eggs will endure.

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