woody allen

Blogging (sigh) you want to be able to revel in the freedoms you are allowed by it, particularly as there's a good argument they are always tenuous and they're a muscle that'll waste away if you don't use them often and freely, and you don't want to be deterred from wading into the mire just because there's a general distaste for those that do. Remember when I got the shits about an old Fall song and got a snapshot of a genuine racist troll in the process for what it was worth (precisely nothing, or at least, it just made me feel dirty). 

I read Woody Allen's memoir Apropos of Nothing yesterday, as prep for something related to work, and it's true, I am the kind of flip-flop whose opinion can be twisted by whatever argument I was most recently exposed to. But I have also read Mia Farrow's memoir from long ago which discusses the same topic (I tried to watch Allen vs Farrow but I couldn't, but I tend not to trust documentaries even when there is far more evidence they are even-handed). I am not going to argue the intricacies of everyone's testimony - just say that the court of public opinion usually sucks as a court, and while nothing I get to hear about in the day-to-day makes me feel that the real legal system in the US has a huge amount going for it, WA has never been found guilty of anything. It seems to me there's a better case that MF cynically weaponised her children against WA using the most awful accusation she could think of, but there I go, getting caught up in the intricacies of testimony, which isn't my place, and a silly blog like this one is not the place to make pronouncements on anything serious unless - and this is a huge 'unless' - the blogger in question is willing to go all out and treat it in a journalistic fashion like a pro. 

I often think of the Joe Orton diaries, where - I'm going to paraphrase because I don't have the book to hand but if I made this up in my unconscious imagination then I have bigger problems than I thought - he records someone in mid-late 60s Britain congratulating him on the decriminalisation of homosexuality and he says well I'm a paedophile and that'll never be decriminalised. Of course Orton is extremely dead (and liked to shock and disgust people) but I note there's not a lot of mention of this self-identification in his wikipedia entry, aside from something about 'rent boys'.  Obviously these 'boys' weren't Kenneth Halliwell's children, but I do still see a bit of a double standard going on, insofar as Orton - his star admittedly a little on the wane these days, based as it is on a brief flurry of celebrity/productivity fifty years ago - has much of a profile to be cancelled. 

Apropos of Nothing is not a great book, I'm sorry to say. It starts out good humouredly, an overview of the artist's first thirty-plus years, including his first two marriages, interesting (to me) bits and pieces around the way a boy humourist in New York in the early 1950s could make twice as much as his parents' combined income in a few hours of typing up jokes-to-order. His he is in his late 30s by the time he is actually making his earliest canon films. He mentions (I think - I didn't tabulate) all his films and if he doesn't actually do justice to each (some discussions are just an anecdote to tick a box), well, there's been a lot of them and in his defence he never watches them again after making them and never reads his reviews, an approach I endorse (that said, for someone who's really down on awards, he often mentions his own and others'). When he gets to the Farrow period he drops the jokiness and adopts a monotone. Following that, back to an extended, and also rather jarring after the two very different tones we have been exposed to, reflection on later career, and finally an account of the 20-teens cancellation, after which the whole thing kind of grinds to a halt. 

I am not sure if it's tone deafness that makes him want to mention without comment Bill Cosby (at least once) and Roman Polanski (in a couple of different contexts) without making any pronouncement on their famous sex crime controversies or whether he's trying to be provocative (he distances himself from Harvey Weinstein professionally saying he wouldn't work with someone who insisted on reediting movies, without making any comment on HW's behaviour; he also makes some oblique comments on Louis CK getting into trouble, without saying anything about the nature of such trouble). I am pretty sure that you can't be in show business for over sixty years without hearing terrible things about everyone, which isn't a reason to turn a blind eye, but might make you less inclined towards believing social justice is achievable even in small measure, particularly if you feel you have been completely denied it yourself as WA apparently does.

One of the real freedoms of blogging IMO is that you don't have an editor saying 'weak conclusion, you need to revise', as though anyone ever reads to the end of any article, ever, anyway. I don't have a conclusion. I don't recommend reading Apropos of Nothing though. You don't learn much, and you don't have much fun along the way.