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

that doesnt mean he didn't publicly reveal it...

https://twitter.com/MiaFarrow/status/247025259562295296

#1 thing i've learned itt is y'all are facebook friends with some assholes jfc

ah i see

still...

xp

painted Mia Farrow as unstable

ball two

yes, we get it

#1 thing i've learned itt is y'all are facebook friends with some assholes jfc

― worthless lucubrations w/ ill-concealed apathy bro (zachlyon), Tuesday, February 4, 2014 8:43 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you aren't?

I'm mostly only facebook friends with people who are less of an asshole than I am. Sometimes it winds up in embarrassment, like the time I made fun of that paleo-running thing and a runner got really offended, or the time I shat on Macklemore and an acquaintance was like "come on, you know it's awesome :)"

Maybe it's fodder for a different thread, but the mention by Lambert of Polanski reminds me of how shocked I was to find out that so many of the famous groupies of that era were essentially high school freshmen - what was it about the '70s that celebrities frollicking with 13 and 14-year olds was acceptable?
Was it just a transfer of the semi-acceptability of young marriage (Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chaplin) combined with the changing sexual mores?

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Tuesday, February 4, 2014 7:14 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It even predates that. Suzy Shaw tells a story in the first Bomp! book about how she and a friend were hanging out on the Sunset Strip in the mid-60s when the were both 14-15, and they were approached by a promoter who needed 'talent' to entertain bands he'd brought into town (this was back you could bring, say, the Animals over and book them at the Whisky for 1-1 1/2 week engagements). They accepted and ended up working with the guy for around six months before bowing out (I believe Suzy married Greg Shaw not long after). She goes on to mention going to work at labels and at Bomp! in the 70s and re-encountering many of the musicians she'd been with, who always told her they felt they knew her from somewhere, but to save embarrassment she wouldn't remind them where or how or when.

one of my fb friends just posted the weide thing again as "a well-researched look at the facts" and unfortunately it's someone i really shouldn't be picking a fight with

admit it, it was woody

i just spent like an hour catching up with this horrible thread:
1. lex never responded to that thing about shady protags but he was being misread and also otm -- it's way too common in film/tv for writers to write their characters with skepticism/irony in mind and then completely betray that by filming them with in a way that seems unaware of the intention. it's more difficult in tv where the viewer's commitment to a character is long and sometimes grueling and that horrible, horrible character still needs to be written and presented in a way that keeps ratings up. but in wide-release mainstream film, too, the baseline is "the audience is meant to relate to the main character" -- that's what's expected, and if a major film isn't very actively chipping away from that in a way that might be too obvious to be good, that horrible character is going have a lot of horrible fans. and sometimes filmmakers are just shitty at using film language and technique to communicate a character's repugnance. it's one of my big problems with breaking bad (spoilers?) and vince gilligan acting so surprised and angered that so many fans supported walt to the end, necessitating that terrible speech to skylar/the camera in the last episode -- it doesn't matter how many times you pound your script with CHARACTER IS BAD if the camera is still portraying him as a hero. please no one respond to this i don't want to derail this thread into breaking bad arguments i never want to talk about breaking bad i'm sorry

2. "these are fundamentally different things tho. rape is a crime. being crazy is not."

ugh in this context accusing mia farrow of insanity is as important as the rape accusation because it's the #1 thing used to invalidate what dylan wrote and defend woody allen in this court of public opinion come on

3. wishing rape on people for any reason invalidates the experiences of people who've been raped and is probably like in the top 5 Ways To Promote Rape Culture come on

you aren't?

― flopson, Tuesday, February 4, 2014 8:58 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no one who shows up on my feed at least has defended woody, just generally not friends anymore with ppl who value facebook as a means of preaching about current events like this one. idk like i'm 25 and i know my """generation""" generally doesn't have much invested in woody but i've possibly made a concerted effort to avoid the types of people my age who are invested in woody

sounds like everyone is generally talking about like their critic friends or professor peers or smth, i'm not friends with those types and apparently that's a good thing

yeah when i saw that comment my first thought was "you're young".

worthless lucubrations of ill-concealed apathy imo

idk like i'm 25 and i know my """generation""" generally doesn't have much invested in woody but i've possibly made a concerted effort to avoid the types of people my age who are invested in woody

I just realized this (probably because I never really thought about it) the other day, but people my age (I'm 31) only know the Soon-Yi-era Woody persona because that's what we grew up with. I was 10 when the controversy was first in the news, and that had to be my introduction to his name. Of course I saw his films later, but viewing them came through that filter, and any discussion of them among peers did as well.

That Didion piece up there is really OTM in some ways, off the mark in some ways. And reminds me of Kael's review of "Play It As It Lays," which IIRC is scathing in a similar way-- so there's some irony there.

I don't really feel inclined to re-evaluate Allen's work in the context of Farrow's account or search for clues in his filmography relating the two because it just feels pointless, and overly biographical readings of people's work (be it music, film, literature whatever) have always seemed tiresome and reductive to me.

Generally speaking, agree with the latter point; recognize you might be referring to some of my posts here.

In my defense, I'm not reading WA's work biographically, tout court. Coming at this as someone who's been a long time fan of WA movies, watched and thought about many of them many times. TBH, I have found myself at times, in passing, engaging in some biographical conjecture-- but think this is almost inevitable with WA, for various reasons (in fair part his own doing)-- anyway this is the least of my interests in, thoughts about, or readings of the films.

I'm not engaging in an "objective" re-evaluation of the films. I'm just describing a *subjective* re-evaluation.. noting a change in the way I, personally, experience and read the films… and I'm interested in probing the how and the why of this change. None of this is generalizable.

Don't mean to be self-righteous or tell anyone else what to think/ feel; I'm more interested in trying to be/ stay honest with myself. NB I read the Vanity Fair and other articles some time ago, and have watched a number of WA films since then, and mostly kept all of that out of my mind. But something, now, for/ in me, has been jostled.

the more general thing is that my friends don't really seem to use facebook as a real social hub for discussion or anything like it anymore and apparently old people do (jk everyone knows that already). actually i'm pretty sure that's just my life idk

xps

the age point is interesting - I've noticed I see more older people defending him on facebook than younger. As one commenter on the grantland piece put it: " I think a lot of us remember what went down over 20 years ago as a kind of War of the Roses between Woody and Mia. "

That explains a lot to me -- at the time the whole thing seemed like such a crazy mess that people threw up their hands, and after all, at that time you had a possibly unreliable and coached seven year old making allegations, not an adult. Now I think a lot of those same people have their opinion of the situation already calcified and are having a hard time processing the new information that has come out -- which isn't really new except that it's an adult maintaining the same allegations.

I am of the age where I (and my high school peers) were culturally "invested" in Woody. We quoted his compiled humor pieces from the New Yorker and film jokes right along with Monty Python's shit. I did "The Moose" standup monologue in drama class. From around 1977-87, starting with Annie Hall, I saw every film of his in Manhattan on opening day.

I found the whole Soon Yi thing creepy in '92, but not especially more creepy than Chaplin's three teenage brides. In the last 15 years the movies got mediocre-to-bad, and when I got a chance to review his last film before this one, I gave it one star out of four, accused him of a pattern of lazy misogyny, and suggested he retire.

So I'm no longer invested. The DF letter was frightening to read. I have a 7-year-old niece and I won't tolerate anyone saying I'm not sufficiently sensitive to child abuse. I still don't know what happened, am sickened by the possibility that he's a child molester, and don't really plan on thinking or reading about this anymore.

I've been pretty stirred up about this issue for the last couple days and it's probably not good for me to keep it going any longer, but I keep reading people saying really deeply offensive things in order to justify Allen's presumed innocence. I guess it's partly that I have a young daughter, and I have also seen this issue play out in other ways more than once in ways I won't get more specific about, but it hits close enough to home that I get very worked up about it, especially when there's a rush to discredit a person who comes forward (totally "innocent" here of course since she's just "confused" and "brainwashed").

dude that's a booming post. Why didn't you write it earlier? Not that you had to, but it would've saved you a lot of yelling.

xpost

no one who shows up on my feed at least has defended woody, just generally not friends anymore with ppl who value facebook as a means of preaching about current events like this one. idk like i'm 25 and i know my """generation""" generally doesn't have much invested in woody but i've possibly made a concerted effort to avoid the types of people my age who are invested in woody

sounds like everyone is generally talking about like their critic friends or professor peers or smth, i'm not friends with those types and apparently that's a good thing

― worthless lucubrations w/ ill-concealed apathy bro (zachlyon), Tuesday, February 4, 2014 9:11 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm younger than you and still had a couple ppl posting the dailybeast article. i have been a fan of his films since high school tho & i guess i don't mind keeping evil trolls in my fb feed

tbf that kinda is what morbz has been saying except without the irascible lashing-out that made it seem agenda'd and turned him full thread boogeyman

am now thinking of how this whole reveal could have been stage-managed differently and it seems to me that dylan farrow shd have had first say, not ronan

A guy in my grad program who is usually super friendly recently gave me a cold shoulder when I dropped an Annie Hall reference (I had to explain the source), cutting off the convo with "I don't watch movies by child molesters." It occurs to me know that he's about my age--too young to have experienced prime-era Woody first hand, but old enough to have been around for the whole post-breakup media blitz. I've talked to plenty of people both older and younger than me who seem to have no problem enjoying Woody's films, and all I can say is that the whole case seemed so bizarre and sensational to me at the time that I couldn't really invest in it enough for it to have any bearing on my own Woody fandom, which a couple of years later (Deconstructing Harry being the first movie of his I saw in the theatre, though I rented the entire What's Up, Tiger Lily? through Mighty Aphrodite stretch, for some reason leaving out only A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and September).

I still feel somewhat "invested" in the sense I own quite a few of his films and watch them semi-regularly, occasionally checking out some of his new ones based on reviews and whatnot (saw Midnight in Paris, skipped You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, for example). I'm still not sure if the Farrow letter changes anything for me, but at the moment I feel like it does. There's probably a tinge of guilt at work here in the sense that what is coming to light is something that I had been being told about all along. I'm not even really condemning him (still remaining somewhat stubbornly stuck on the notion that he is "possibly" a child molester, myself) nor am I in any position to--I just can't enjoy his films right now.

it seems to me that dylan farrow shd have had first say, not ronan

― imago, Tuesday, February 4, 2014 9:37 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

it seems to me that dylan farrow shd have had first say, not ronan

― imago, Tuesday, February 4, 2014 9:37 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, she kind of did, in the Vanity Fair piece last year iirc

hmm, wonder why it didn't blow up then

think ronan and twitter have a lot to answer for in obfuscating the course of karma here

It seems to me more likely that after the Vanity Fair article didn't really create much of a stir, and then the Golden Globes thing went forward, Ronan lashed out in frustration. Perhaps that's also what prompted the Times thing.

I mean, remember this is a guy who, no matter how media savvy, seems to genuinely believe his sister was molested by a celebrated director. I would imagine he was legitimately furious to watch the Golden Globes presentation.

vanity fair piece ignored, brother who live-snarks everything live-snarks the globes, people go OMG, he and his mom fill in the blanks, Woody documentarian says "hey don't forget mom's crazy," daughter decides to nullify said argument to the best of her capabilities.

and unless dylan expresses disappointment with him, none of us really have any right to say ronan was in poor form.

'defend sister' isn't an impulse i'm gonna attack any brother for having, whatever quibbles about how it was 'stage managed' might exist.

not saying ronan was in poor form! just that it wasn't especially politic of him and that while it hasn't exactly backfired, it could have fired a lot harder. he's had many, many years to defend her & at this point you have to talk of stage-managing, even if the tweet itself was a white-hot enraged blurt

i suppose it's all achieved its ultimate goal of basically killing WA for whole hordes of his fans and tarnishing his name for posterity

poor fucking dylan tho getting impugned by the other half of the horde

because Alfred, i give about as much of a shit about booming posts as I do "good karaoke."

I do 100% believe that Mia asked Woody in the middle of the '92 blowup "When do we start the next movie?" Make of that what you will.

i think if there's "crazy" there with mia farrow, hypothetically (and going on the notion that what dylan says is true) much of it could be chalked up to discovering this and faced with the prospect of calling out the person you love, who also happens to be your primary artistic collaborator as well as this person being at the time one of the biggest directors in the world (and even now 20+ years later he's still one of the biggest names in cinema). i mean there must have been denial to some degree, blaming herself, hating herself, and all that coupled with the soon-yi thing and how everything just seemed to cause a moderate ripple and become fodder for late night jokes and soon enough he's back to cranking out a handful of widely regarded films. i mean when people are saying "huh maybe dylan seemed coached" it's possible that even if this did in fact occur that she had to be coaxed to talk about it, which perhaps might be misread as "coaching" in the sense that most people seem to think of it, as she was fed answers and fed a story.

i mean if mia farrow is crazy she might a decent excuse. and one of our closest friends was sexually assaulted as a child and it's basically rendered her incapable of engaging in any relationships whatsoever. and because of who did it, her mother's boyfriend, her mother has been carrying shit with her for years as well and it's caused some real emotional issues and denial and estrangement and all that. and this is without any attendant publicity and fame and seeing the attempt at prosecution derailed before it left the station and seeing the perpetrator continuing to be adored and beloved and seeing it written off like a joke.

On the topic of FB, I have a couple friends who posted to basically vent their frustration with all the doubt and dismissal aimed at Dylan (anyone see Stephen Kings gross comments?) only to get the same assholish comments from their friends that we've been seeing all over the place. Makes me think that having any discussion about this on FB is pretty hopeless unless you are just looking for a way to draw out the assholes and whittle down your friends list.

Yeah, people seem to be having real trouble distinguishing between 'putting together an opinion based on what you can gather about it' and 'forming a literal lynch mob'

A lot of talk about how, intellectually, we should all be keeping our distance and remaining non-judgmental until sufficient evidence is in, to which tbh and notwithstanding some of my blathering upthread, my response right now is 'Be consistent with this across everything and not just to defend the statistically probably child-molester who made those films you like'

Steubenville was actually the potential crime/internet phenom that slowed me down a little in this week's case. That one seemed so crystal-clear awful and black-and-white, with the Internet tearing the lid off a sleepy town and exposing all the corruption, only to have much of what wad reported as fact be inaccurate.

props to the guy in somebody's anecdote for taking a stance but: 'I don't watch movies by child molesters' is just kinda like ... like it's a hollywood view of hollywood

xp Note that since that article came out, a few school officials, included the school superintendent, were charged with obstructing justice, so there actually seems to have been a cover-up of some sort. Interesting article still; I would have liked to have heard from the other four accused as well.
http://www.newsweek.com/why-no-one-talking-about-second-steubenville-rape-case-207333

I don't vote for guys who blow apart 7-year-olds

As long as we're surveying generations, the only IRL Woody defender I know is an 80 year old man. My Facebook feed has been silent...

I was a long time fan of Cerebus from the beginning and am having an uncomfortable flashback to More Dave Sim Batshittery.

the thing with labelling mia farrow "crazy" is that it's a fucking meaningless word designed to play on misogynist archetypes. crazy, hysterical, irrational - when are high-profile men and the things they have to say dismissed like this?

"crazy": are you saying she has a mental illness? if so you should probably stop right there before using that word in the first place or implying a link between mental illness and her actions. if you're not saying she's mentally ill, how do you intend "crazy" to be read? if mia farrow has, at times in her life, been emotional or vindictive or eccentric, well, that means she's a human being, and being one or all of those things at one time doesn't preclude her from NOT being those things at other times, or from telling the truth in this case.

calling woody allen an abuser relates to specific accusations, calling mia farrow "crazy" is a handwavey and nebulous attempt to portray her character as a one-dimensional archetype that doesn't really exist.

re: generations - i have no anecdata in this instance because i was offline all weekend and haven't gone back to check, but i wouldn't be so smug about millennials' attitude to rape culture (see: r kelly). though i have noticed that older types tend to actively defend their heroes in these cases whereas younger types don't necessarily say anything but just continue to act as if they haven't heard the accusations

Or do younger types just assume that this sort of thing is far more common.

but in wide-release mainstream film, too, the baseline is "the audience is meant to relate to the main character" -- that's what's expected, and if a major film isn't very actively chipping away from that in a way that might be too obvious to be good, that horrible character is going have a lot of horrible fans. and sometimes filmmakers are just shitty at using film language and technique to communicate a character's repugnance.

I realise you don't want to derail this thread, but I really don't think this is a massively compelling argument against seeing the central character of Manhattan as being purposefully written as massively flawed, morally and otherwise.

Lex absolutely otm there