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

Let's not pretend that any selfrighteous ilx posts affect anything in this case.

conviction via internet

Oh hey Amanda Palmer has an opinion. I'll stop there.

Usually, "self-righteous" is applied to situations where the crime is less black-and-white than rape.

So yeah, I'll be self-righteous and say, yeah, I've never raped anyone, or been accused of it.

hate u ned

shouldn't the person who does ted talks about how you should sell access to your presence because people love your art be the LAST person arguing for "separating the art from the artist?"

Farrow didnt post her letter to ilx zachylon

amanda palmer aside, like, i'm not gonna let go of annie hall either but separating the artist from the art he wrote and directed and appeared in every scene of and based on his own life to the point of seamlessly including old tv clips of himself recontextalized "in character" is not rly all that easy

purple rose or even something like zelig a lil different sure but it's worth mentioning

shouldn't the person who does ted talks about how you should sell access to your presence because people love your art be the LAST person arguing for "separating the art from the artist?"

killin' it here croup

Farrow didnt post her letter to ilx zachylon

― How dare you tarnish the reputation of Turturro's yodel (Shakey Mo Collier), Saturday, February 1, 2014 7:55 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what she did has nothing to do with "conviction via internet" -- she posted her letter on the internet because it's 2014 and maybe she didn't want to write a 300 page tell-all. she was... trying to tell her story? contribute it to the neverending pile of woody allen stories in the media already? you're just using "internet" to downplay it. it could've been published on fucking twitter and it would still be "dylan farrow talking about being sexually abused by woody allen"

it doesn't matter how it was posted or where it was posted or when, it comes down to whether you believe she's telling the truth or she's lying because mia and ronan brainwashed her or something. what difference does it make being on the internet where this entire discussion is already happening anyway

I was drawing a distinction between what farrow did and what we do here is all

Ie Farrow trying to convict in the court of opinion, and some of us here obliging

oh god won't someone please save woody from the court of opinion

clearly his standing in america is fragile, my god at this rate he might not get a kennedy centers honors tribute

lol

xp

so? imagine for a brief second that she might actually be telling the truth. she's already been failed by a system that wouldn't do anything today if she tried, that wouldn't have convicted him back then if it even went to trial. what else is she supposed to do besides sit idly for the rest of her life? the court of opinion was already giving him lifetime achievement awards, why isn't she allowed to have a say in it. the court of opinions been making its own accusations about her and mia and ronan for years, but there's only one person you're defending itt.

i believe people who say they've been raped more than the decisions of any judge or jury, if that's a problem for you then this isn't worth discussing

I dont think this is analogous to jackson, pokanski, kelly or spector because a) those all went to trial and b) in most cases there was an established pattern of behavior or multiple victims.

Didn't mean to imply that they were the same, just that Farrow (like anyone else) is going to be aware of how easily beloved celebs are "forgiven" in Hollywood even when there are trails/multiple victims. So why should she expect anything to be different in this case?

I don't know if I was one of the people who "ok, he's convicted then" was aimed at or not, but that was not my aim in my post. The question posed by Farrow was "what's your favourite Woody Allen movie?" and I was responding to that through the lens of her letter. Yes, it *does* trouble me that the journalist who broke the story is a friend of the family for the same reason as that piece defending Woody was written by someone who had worked with him in the past. In the Farrow case, though, it implies a level of conspiracy that, if none of this is true, would be every bit as fucked up as anything Woody is alleged to have done.

ugh...never going to watch a Woody movie the same way

Yes, it *does* trouble me that the journalist who broke the story is a friend of the family for the same reason as that piece defending Woody was written by someone who had worked with him in the past.

also very troubling that when Woody masturbates he has sex with someone he loves

we're all gonna be eating a lot of crow when the nefarious mia farrow and her network of powerful co-conspirators/evil satan-children are revealed to have set the whole thing up

i guess it sorta is easier to believe that she spent the past several decades of her life setting all that up than it is to believe woody "Manhattan (1979)" allen is a child molester

Keyword in my above post was implies. It seems to me that there are three things being argued here:

1. Woody is a child molester. Fuck him.

2. Woody is a child molester. But hey, love the art, not the artist.

3. Dylan Farrow, as coached by and/or conspiring with her mother, brother and a friend at the New York Times, are going to great and (as noted above) possibly criminal lengths to defame Woody.

As for whether 1/2 or 3 is true, I don't know. As for what I believe, I'm still not sure. Everything I've posted here today is just my attempt (possibly/likely haphazard) to engage with all of the arguments and possibilities at hand.

amanda palmer aside, like, i'm not gonna let go of annie hall either but separating the artist from the art he wrote and directed and appeared in every scene of and based on his own life to the point of seamlessly including old tv clips of himself recontextalized "in character" is not rly all that easy

I mean, on reading Farrow's piece I suddenly went off the WA films I'd previously liked up until that moment – Manhattan's photography just shrank, and its plot just became prominent for me, especially the attitude the film takes towards the events of its plot.

We don't have to write off a drastic reassessment of the art, triggered by new knowledge about the artist, if our reassessment is valid in itself. Yes, we can sometimes easily dismiss a work based on the artist being a bad person, but then we can also give a work too much leeway based on assuming the artist is a *good* person ...

At least films are made by lots of people working together.

horrifying revelations abt marshall brickman to follow

breaking: gordon willis literally the prince of darkness

There's a certain lack-of-empathy masquerading as calm rationality that drives me up the fukkin wall

Yeah, I often think that just after I've said something about a case like this. I can't really put my actual feelings on reading farrow's account into words, though.

are ppl really that invested in woody allen?

ppl love when harry met sally!

he's an enormously important, singular director that pulled together really diffuse elements & forged a new vocabulary from them. he's also I guess a paedophile who should be in prison? attachment to him artistically isn't the question, cultural attachment/esteem isn't weird from any angle afaict

I wonder if people who are too young to have read these accusations in '92-96 are also too young for the McMartin preschool case and Capturing the Friedmans

Go fuck yourself

I see Weide is, um, taking this in stride

https://twitter.com/BobWeide/status/429815204348563456

Don't see too many parallels between this and the McMartin case (Satanic Ritual Abuse) tbh

I mean, yes, there's a danger of some users of this forum jumping to conclusions, but then, those conclusions are not exactly unfounded, and are also about a very rich and powerful person none of us has any power over

Some jackasses on FB were using the hunt as some sort of proof that false child abuse allegations are rampant last week and I was like this is a fiction film you idiots

But there's an important question here which is what kind of attitude we should have towards rape or child abuse allegations which we have nothing to do with, when we are just observers.

I basically assume that there's no smoke without a fire. My impression is that false allegations are very rare in reality, but a few high-profile false allegations give us the illusion that this is something people do regularly for profit or to destroy someone's reputation. Other kinds of allegation - yeah, sure, but not so much this one, because you can allege that someone's been committing fraud without begin dragged through the gravel yourself, but if you allege that someone has abused you ...

That assumption I'm making wouldn't be acceptable if I was the judge or the jury, clearly, but as an observer?

i don't think we have any way of really knowing how common false allegations are in this types of situations. however, if someone told me something horrible like this happened to them i would believe them, 100%. it would seem monstrous not to and seriously, what could dylan, mia, or ronan possibly gain by continuing to tell this story decades later? i say this as someone who doesn't just like woody allen's movies but loves many of them.

xp to self

It seems wrong to treat 'assuming this person is a liar', and 'assuming this person is telling the truth', as if these assumptions are equally bad. As an observer, I'll stress again.

I would say that even someone who really hates their father is unlikely to make such an accusation falsely. When you think about it, plenty of people hate their father and haven't spoken to them in years but they haven't made such an allegation, not just because it would be immoral to make that allegation falsely but also because it would be a weird and improbable way to react to the situation. Even if they had very bitter feelings towards their father they would still understand the gravity of such an accusation and I think few people could pluck up the nerve to do that when they know they will be scrutinised by many people. So I believe her.

It seems pretty simple to me - the letter and the '92 investigation don't make me want to throw Allen into jail for the rest of his life, but those combined with the Soon-Yi situation are more than enough to make me never want to patronize anything he's involved with.

There have been monsters who made great art while doing worse things, sure - but I have to draw the line somewhere on what I can stomach supporting in the name of well-made art/greatness (and that line cuts out the Polanskis, Allens, Tysons of the world).

But there's an important question here which is what kind of attitude we should have towards rape or child abuse allegations which we have nothing to do with, when we are just observers.

Seriously? In like at least 3 different ways.

Personally I am happy to jettison Allen's work because I've been doing that anyway. His films can be often be very well crafted and funny but I think there is a certain sort of emotional depth in the really great artists that he doesn't quite have for me. I have sometimes enjoyed art by very fucked up people - I must admit that I think some of Polanski's films are truly remarkable. The thing with Allen though is that my knowledge of him as a person kind of confirms what I had felt about certain aspects of his work anyway - his negative portrayals of women, for example.

in orbit, go on?

that doesn't seem like something that desperately needs unpacking, cardamon; you are just saying Hm But Truly Who Are We To Disapprove Of Murder?, it's like one of those heroic Jesus interventions amid a stoning only it's "really can child abuse ever really be ~known~?" how is a lack of actual omnipresent witness status an impediment to policy against abuse?

definitely the most important thing in a case like this is for us to immediately figure out whether we can still feel ok liking woody allen's movies

Obviously allen is a shitty person. Has no bearing on his work afaic.

― How dare you tarnish the reputation of Turturro's yodel (Shakey Mo Collier), Saturday, February 1, 2014 7:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*rocks back and forth, hands over ears*

His shittiness obv has bearing on his work. It's impossible (ime) to read Alice w/out wondering about Lewis Carroll personal life. Similarly here where ppl have pointed out itt some of the films already explicitly make such connections (Manhattan), but I've found myself looking back at Annie Hall in a new light. After all it's hard to go back to seeing his movies as sophisticated, insightful comments on adult male + female relationships after you learn about such dramatic deficiencies in his own ability to conduct age-appropriate relationships (nb maybe it's naive to consider this now instead of earlier but…) - eg Annie Hall where he basically educates + teaches this intellectually immature woman until she's not only his intellectual equal but in fact too grown up for him. Diane Keaton isn't playing a literal child but the resonances can't be ignored. Obv the entire corpus will need to be reevaluated

"we" have no business "figuring out" anything else xxp

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-who-did-this-to-dylan-farrow

while you watch that '92 60 Mins interview, i'll be lkistening to the James Brown, Woman Beater box.

I still don't understand how a man who married his adopted daughter being a child molester and Mia Farrow somehow brainwashing her child into believing a totally fictional crime happened well into adulthood are being treated as 2 equally likely possibilities

"his adopted daughter"

this thread breaks the record for not knowing what facts are knowable

definitely the most important thing in a case like this is for us to immediately figure out whether we can still feel ok liking woody allen's movies

― socki (s1ocki), Sunday, February 2, 2014 4:26 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not the most important thing, no. But the reason there is so much discussion of this case in the first place is because he is a famous director whose work has been admired by many people, so whether that can continue after this is of some relevance I think.