Mia Farrow's son -- Ronan Seamus Farrow -- really creeps me out!

do you guys know anyone who thinks the movie takes Alvy's side when Annie dumps him? I met one person who thinks so; I might de-friend him.

Phil I believe you mean "sorry, I was wrong"

i think the sam adams essay murgatroid posted is pretty blanket otm re: artist/art, "what to believe", evaluation of WA filmography

lol, yes, aero, I was wrong. My apologies for offending the delicate shrinking violet that is Dr. Morbius, who never reduces complex ideas to dumbshit binaries. Mea maxima culpa.

Times public editor "troubled" by Kristof

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/on-kristofs-column-about-dylan-farrow-and-woody-allen-only-questions/

hahahahahaha, "the Daily Beast piece convinced me that Dylan Farrow writing about her rape is an ad hominem attack on Woody Allen"

fuuuuuck off

the comments left on that piece are nauseating.

lol of course it's a fucking ad hominem attack, what else would accusing someone of child molestation be? What a fucking moron.

curious what Allen's statement is going to be. or if his lawyers are gonna do anything.

lol of course it's a fucking ad hominem attack, what else would accusing someone of child molestation be? What a fucking moron.

― Burt Stuntin (Hurting 2), Monday, February 3, 2014 2:27 PM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know if this is directed to me but I thought ad hominem meant an attack on someone's character, not describing their actions.

The letter penned in the name of Dylan Farrow was pitch-perfect, compelling, and heart-wrenching but I feel Kristoff and the Grey Lady diluted their credibility by providing this favor to friends.

lol of course it's a fucking ad hominem attack, what else would accusing someone of child molestation be? What a fucking moron.

― Burt Stuntin (Hurting 2), Monday, February 3, 2014 2:27 PM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know if this is directed to me but I thought ad hominem meant an attack on someone's character, not describing their actions.

― Murgatroid, Monday, February 3, 2014 4:30 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wasn't directing the insult to you. Yes, an "ad hominem" attack is an attack on someone's character, but what it means is attacking someone's character to avoid addressing the reasoning of their arguments. Accusing someone of child molestation is quite literally an attack on their character, so it's kind of silly to call that an "ad hominem" attack.

morbs I must've written and deleted 10 different comments about your behavior in this thread over the weekend. basically: child sex abuse is a delicate topic; some readers of this thread have been victims of it; the way society chooses to respond to allegations of abuse can affect their internal processing of what happened to themselves; therefore it would be kind and considerate to post on this thread with their emotional well-being in mind. You think it's important not to condemn someone on insufficent evidence; there are ways to express that thoughtfully without engaging in alienating, OTT rhetoric.

except in this case there is actually sufficient evidence.

So thanks to that shithead Weide half the internet is now repeating the claim that Moses Farrow thinks the whole incident was "concocted." Weide used a totally out-of-context and unsourced quote about "brainwashing" to imply this without saying it.

reddening, I have scrapped several posts to this thread precisely for those reasons. Cue incredulity.

why don't you fucking leave

Hurting, did you also just read the awful bet-hedging Salon piece that was just published that's just like "there's so much doubt!" and leaves it there without adding anything at all? I'd honestly rather read an Allen defence than read something so meaningless and dull.

don't be completely worthless and at least keep your promises xp

I'd honestly rather read an Allen defence

lol what kind of defense could there possibly be? beyond "I didn't do it, the child is a liar"

implying "the child is brainwashed" seems to the be approach of choice

eh, a distinction w/out a difference

I'm not saying the defence would be good, just saying that I personally would rather spend my time with an argument of some sort than an acknowledgement of ambiguity and an oh-well.

xp

I disagree ime it's exactly what is allowing apologists who normally wouldn't stoop to victim blaming to be inordinately skeptical of such unambiguous first hand testimony

unless public outcry is going to be marshalled to the end of bringing charges (which looks highly unlikely), I don't really see the point of engaging with arguments on either side.

xp

I'm just waiting for anyone to produce for me a single historical example of a child being brainwashed into thinking they were abused and continuing to believe that into adulthood. People keep raising the daycare abuse panic and "recovered memory" controversies, which are TOTALLY DIFFERENT THINGS.

yeah there's no parallels there

I mean one of the most revealing damning things about McMartin/Friedmans sort of cases is how the purported victims all recanted in adulthood

shakey's otm there - I've always, always been a "believe the testimony of the victim" person and the McMartin case is a very very heavy thing to consider.

I said this upthread somewhere but the only parallel case I can think of is John Phillips - but even there Mackenzie claims the incidents didn't begin until she was 18, and at the time she dropped this bombshell Phillips had already been dead 8 years. so even that's stretching it. there's no real precedent for this kind of case afaik. at least, not one involving a celebrity of Allen's stature and the related public scrutiny.

could charges be brought at this point? I'm not even clear on that much.

idk the mcmartin case at all. but at least from the documentary on it, the nauseating thing about the friedman case was that he DID molest kids but the prosecutorial panic added a bunch of false accusations to his tab. right?

bady's point is that leaning on the few high-profile cases of false accusations is a really shitty mental convenience, taking anecdote over data. that sullivan blogpost lets someone air out the duke rape case one more time, smh. we'll never be able to talk about rape in this culture again w/o someone bringing up the duke lacrosse team.

he DID molest kids but the prosecutorial panic added a bunch of false accusations to his tab. right

this is not right

uh can you flesh it out then? my memory may faulty but god help me if i get through it again

the dad had child porn, and appears to have engaged in some possibly criminal behavior, but not with the kids in his class (possibly his son, and possibly one other case he confessed to in a letter iirc)

that thing is so tangled... dad pled guilty to try and spare his son (who had also been implicated)

the McMartin case also that was filled with all sorts of bizarre moral panic devil worship stuff, it doesn't seem like a good cautionary tale for pro-Woody concern trolls to rely on

Some of the accusations were described as "bizarre",[5] overlapping with accusations that mirrored the just-starting Satanic ritual abuse panic.[4] It was alleged that, in addition to having been sexually abused, they saw witches fly, traveled in a hot-air balloon, and were taken through underground tunnels.[4] When shown a series of photographs by Danny Davis (the McMartins' lawyer), one child identified actor Chuck Norris as one of the abusers.[20]

"could charges be brought at this point? I'm not even clear on that much."

No they can't. It's passed the statute of limitations.

was thinking some of those Catholic church cases were decades old...? but maybe those are different somehow.

The catholic church cases in the USA were civil cases, not criminal cases. Dylan could presumably sue Mr. Allen, if she could produce compelling evidence for a tort.

Addendum: The most compelling evidence in the catholic church cases was contained in catholic church internal documents obtained through subpoena. Not very likely there is a trove of documentary evidence for her to produce on her behalf, but it would be nice to see some justice done.

yeah if it's just her word against his... I guess public defamation is really her only recourse

"was thinking some of those Catholic church cases were decades old...? but maybe those are different somehow"

Most of those cases were not actually able to be tried due to the statute of limitations.

A friend of mine just compared Woody Allen to Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 'they may be horrible people but I'll continue enjoying their work'.

I'm genuinely undecided about this myself. But the more I think about it, the more his movies are ruined for me.

I don't mean, I'm taking a moral stand (like, can't in good conscience enjoy/ support work by someone so reprehensible, so I'm boycotting it), nor is it just a matter of negative association (like, can't enjoy his work without being reminded of his IRL despicableness). I mean, I find my aesthetic judgment of his works, his later works (as opposed to his "early funny ones") affected and altered in light of all this.

It's difficult if not impossible to disentangle ethical and aesthetic judgments in the case of a filmmaker like WA, when so many of his movies are-- not extraordinary visual or poetic works-- but psychological-ethical inquiries themselves. (In this respect like 19th-century novels.)

The more I think about it, the more I'm struck by the… shallowness, jejunosity of his movies' seemingly deep existential/ ethical preoccupations. The smugness. And the self-serving.

Came across an interview in which WA says how "lucky" it was for him that Farrow found those nude pictures of SY. Lucky. (Lucky for me you had such a devastating experience, Mia.) "The heart wants what the heart wants," and WA got his heart's desire, now happily married to Soon Yi.

I think of the cozy contentedness of Michael Caine (wiser and happier now) at the end of Hannah and Her Sisters. Landau's smugness (wiser and happier now) at the end of C&M.

What I can't help but see now in the movies is a kind of smug self-congratulation: WA's own self-congratulation for attaining-- beyond good and evil, as it were-- a (self)knowledge most of us pathetic deluded mortals (as he sees us) hide from ourselves. The smugness of the adolescent nihilist, yet something worse, more monstrous. Someone who flaunts his existential angst and thereby immunizes/ excuses himself from ethical judgment-- because (having achieved that harsh existential self-knowledge) he transcends ethical judgment. After all, ethical/ moral judgment has something naive/ banal/ loserish about it (like, only people who (need to) believe in God, like the blind rabbi, or embittered losers like the WA character in C&M, or writers of "Hollywood endings" think that way). The hero bravely bears the awful truth: he got away with his crime, and found happiness, and this gives him insight into the meaninglessness of the universe and the foolishness of all mortals (including WA's characters and his audience). The hero-filmmaker's mind is large enough to incorporate the ethical voice ("conscience") in himself-- or voice it as a character in his films-- but it's subordinated and detached and weak. It doesn't really touch him; he's beyond it.

It's like, the more transparently WA confesses his sins through his films, the more unsparingly he depicts his character stand-ins as the utter bastards they are, the more he (thereby) excuses and congratulates himself. Doesn't just excuse himself, but presents himself as superior to those who would judge him-- because he has attained a nihilistic wisdom others lack.

It's repellent. The sociopath congratulates himself for his philosophical wisdom.

I don't know how to express my feeling here, exactly. If I was witty I'd put it in the form ILXors riffed on in the "My mom thinks I'm cool" thread.

NB It's not the nihilistic/ cynical/ immoral worldview expressed in movies I have a problem with. It's that now, I can't help but see WA's movies as ways in which, again and again, WA rationalizes/ absolves himself of any guilt… and even more perversely, congratulates himself for it, turns his vice into virtue, his crime into wisdom.

As WA himself has said, there's no such thing as morality/ justice in the WA universe; there's only luck. The Michael Caine, Landau, Rhys-Myers characters-- at the end of the day, they're *lucky* they did what they did (had an affair with his wife's sister; murdered his mistress). All in all, on balance, things turned out for the best. Only philosophically naive or resentful losers would begrudge them their happiness/ luck.

I congratulate you on your luck (so far), Woody.

This revenge-brainwashing defense must be common for predators. A long time ago a girl my mom babysat accused her father of abuse and he claimed that she was coached by her adult sister who had a grudge against him (i wonder why)

"I'm open-minded about sex. I'm not above reproach; if anything, I'm below reproach. I mean, if I was caught in a love nest with 15 12-year-old girls tomorrow, people would think, yeah, I always knew that about him." Allen pauses. "Nothing I could come up with would surprise anyone," he ventures helplessly. "I admit to it all."

-Woody Allen, 1978, People Magazine: http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20066950,00.html

I think the strongest evidence that Woody is very very guilty is that Dylan/Malone still believes he molested her That is almost definitively damning and it is very difficult to imagine no matter how screwed up Mia Farrow is (and I am definitely of the opinion that she's pretty screwed up) that she could have coached her daughter into carrying that around for 20+ years. That said prior to the recent Vanity Fare article and the letter, it was also very easy to dismiss this all as a convoluted and ugly divorce proceeding with a lot of he saids/she saids so I think most people (read: most people like myself) can be somewhat forgiven for not giving it a tremendous amount of weight until now. But now come on.

otm

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/03/the_uneasy_ambiguity_of_the_woody_allen_case/

that's how i feel too xxp. the descriptions of being overwhelmed by bad feeling at the mention or sight of WA were what made me decide i couldn't wonder anymore if this was something blown vaguely up by mia; now i feel like the only honest way i could defend allen would be to say that dylan's lying. even if i put aside higher concerns like avoiding victim-blaming combating rape culture etc., that would still seem hugely unlikely and pointless. whereas allen lying is... likely and pointy.