Had I liked it? I mumbled something innocuous about how they seemed like an odd couple. He spent the rest of the interview asking about my plans for the day. I was going to have lunch with a friend from high school who was a freshman there, I told him. A male friend or a female friend? Was he my boyfriend? Was I going to sleep over that night? I remember my relief when the interview ended without it getting any worse than that.
I got wait listed there, which was what I had expected going in. If I had spoken glowingly about the Allen-Hemingway relationship, would I have been accepted to the university? But I feel strongly that this fairly horrendous situation gives the lie to the polite fiction that the film was just portraying an unconventional relationship.
No, it was weird and predatory, if technically legal. Now I wonder: How could the Soon-Yi scandal and the subsequent reckoning that Allen has faced including the child molestation allegations truly surprise anyone who had their eyes open when they watched Manhattan? That the relationship was in Manhattan was technically legal has never been in dispute—17 was the age of consent in New York—but, in retrospect, it seems telling that at the time it stirred next to no controversy, both in the film and off screen.
What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values? When the film first came out, the critics lavished it with praise. At the time, she was a lone voice crying out in the wilderness. Allen was at the height of his fame and critical acceptance, coming off the unexpected mainstream success of Annie Hall , which won four Oscars in , including Best Picture. I care about you. Your concerns are my concerns. We have great sex.
Here, he presented himself utterly unironically as a sexual object for this gorgeous young girl. Revealingly, Hemingway herself admitted in later years that acting this role was uncomfortable for her.
She wrote in her memoir, Out Came the Sun , that playing this part made her anxious. She bowed out when it became clear to her that he expected her to share a bed with him. Both have acknowledged that the Hemingway-Allen relationship in the film seemed to be inspired by their own relationships with the director and mentioned being aware that he was involved with other teenagers.
Pubescent and post-pubescent girls have always been objects of male desire, though it is only fairly recently that society as a whole has been forced to reckon with this objectification and understand it as abuse rather than titillation. Whether you believe the allegations against him or not, no one can argue with the fact that Allen is a narcissistic creep whose wildly inappropriate sexual compulsions have been feted for too long. Is he funny? Hell yes. Is he in some ways a brilliant filmmaker?
Sure, absolutely. Many recalled a time when affairs between teens and much older men—often authority figures—were commonplace. Clearly, my query about their perceptions of the film touched a nerve. The experience was visceral. I might even go as far as to say, with this film, Woody Allen was like the the Leni Riefenstahl of pedophilia. Its visual style was I think, almost a way of distracting us from the fact that he was trying to recast the child molestation as something that was OK. It watered it down and confused the issue and completely glamorized sleaze.
Anmiryam Budner, a bookseller who was in 12th grade in New York when the movie came out, admits that, in some ways, she envied the gorgeous, sophisticated Tracy. I was, I hate to admit, jealous. The same lack of integrity to cause so many people to take the easy way out. I mean, face it, I wanna sell some books here. Yale betrays his own better self. He wants to start a literary magazine, but he uses the money to buy a Porsche.
And now look. This is what happens to us. Woody Allen always brings in death. One can joke about death, but death is not to be taken lightly. But Ike is caught between two sets of values just as Everyman was.
As he suggests here, facing death as Everyman did and we all do, he has to make the right choice. He made the wrong one when he left Tracy for Mary, hurting the girl cruelly in the process. The difference comes in the opening conversation among Mary, Yale, Ike, and Tracy, when Ike contrasts talent and courage.
With talent, you make works of art. With courage, you save people. The opposite of Mary and Yale, Tracy represents innocence and trust. You have to have a little faith in people. New York, by contrast, stands for things going from bad to worse. He adored New York City, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage. Possibly Woody Allen is reminding us that he has created a beautified Manhattan, not the real thing, but a work of art.
He makes himself into a work of art:. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. A dreadful line! Bad Dashiell Hammett or Damon Runyon. Also, what Ike says here is false. The women define both the worlds that Ike and Yale are to choose between, the corrupt and the innocent.
He fears that his ex-wife and her lesbian partner will have his boy wearing dresses. Mary and the ex-wife can cancel his sexual powers, while Tracy can praise them. But Ike is being, like other Woody Allen heroes, Pygmalion. He is working out a Woody Allen fantasy that a middle-aged man will educate a younger woman into sophistication. In starts three and four, Ike defines two worlds, one with integrity and civility, one with dishonesty and a trash culture.
In starts one, two, and five, Ike defines one of those worlds, the bad one: it involves treating people or the whole city into works of art to be casually consumed, discussed, judged, and perhaps dismissed. Woody Allen defines those two worlds most clearly in a soliloquy by Ike late in the movie. Emily, deserted by Yale but still entangled in his deceptions, blames Ike for introducing Yale to Mary when it was the other way round: Yale introduced Mary to Ike. Instead, he goes back to his apartment and starts talking to his tape recorder again, where, we now realize, this movie began.
He tackles his writing once more as in the opening prologue. An idea for a short story about, um, people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves cause; it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about.
Well, it has to be optimistic. Well, all right, why is life worth living? Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile. The other three friends buy a copy and walk down the street, reciting passages out loud and laughing. Angry, Isaac confronts Jill, yet cannot defend himself, and is merely left with more accusations.
Upset, he confronts Yale in a scene of mock bravado, attacking both Yale for his inability to let Isaac know the truth, as well as Mary for her immaturity, all the while wishing he were still with her, and admitting this without quite understanding the irony. In the next scene, Isaac is speaking into a tape recorder, noting the things that make life worth living. He runs through a panorama of New York City, catching Tracy in the last minute, right before she is set to depart for London for six months.
Isaac, after all, runs to Tracy only when Mary leaves him. Yes, he seems to surprise even himself when he says her name into the tape recorder, but did the name come up organically, or was it borne merely out of his recent loss, and thus loneliness? Yale will now have to deal with a broken marriage. Twelve years, in his estimation, is a long time. Isaac, then, is ultimately a winner, for all the reasons that winners are so often hated. It does not concern him, however.
He is not Martin Landau in Crimes and Misdemeanors , and is not evil.
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