Woody Allen’s new movie, Blue Jasmine, sent me into paroxysms of literary glee. His paean to Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire hit all of its marks and then some. I fully expect Cate Blanchett to win an Oscar for her flawless turn as a modernized, Xanax-popping Blanche DuBois. Only the acerbic wit of Woody Allen could do justice to Williams’ classic play. As I gushed about the merits of the film, one of my friends, a brilliant Scottish poet who lives honestly and is always true to his inner Elvis, loudly proclaimed that he would never see a movie made by a “door-scratching lecher who fucked his own child.” While I am the first to admit that Woody Allen is among the sleaziest in a long line of sleazy directors, his personal life falling in an obnoxious, Napoleonic heap somewhere between Roman Polanski’s nymphomania and Mel Gibson’s racism, I fully acknowledge his genius as a writer and director. Having the resolve to boycott his movies is beyond my level of engagement, as I would then need to eschew so many products, services, and entertainment options that I would die an altruistic asthete on my couch made of nails.
After all, Mia Farrow, Allen’s wife in the 2oth century, adopted a tribe of Benneton kids that dwarfed the Jolie-Pitts and made Madonna look like a dilettante in the game of ethnic child collecting. The fact that Woody Allen, a notorious casting couch lothario suffering from a serious Napoleon complex, slept with and later married one of the children should serve as an ominous warning to these international octo-mom wannabes. Adopting a herd of diverse Lolitas into the household of a well-known Don Juan is like staking out a lamb in white tiger territory.
While I wouldn’t vote any of the aforementioned directors into public office, their stellar work remains unblemished by pedophilia, ethnocentrism, and misogyny. It stands alone, timeless testimonial to artistic vision. Conversely, Stanley Kubrick, John Ford, and Frank Capra produced work that was clichéd, simplistic, and formulaic to me, although each by most accounts led lives worthy of moral emulation. I have always believed that art stands alone, independent of the artist who created it. My Jewish friends stopped patronizing Mel Gibson’s films after his boozy roadside rant a decade ago, and I applaud them for their commitment. Just don’t expect me to join the boycott, not because I endorse his anti-semitic beliefs, but because I judge his work on its artistic merit alone, although it does seem that the public’s distaste for his personal life did whip back on him like an out-of-control firehose and extinguish any creative talent that remained after he’d booze-stewed his brain.
Maybe my failure to join arms and march against the powers of Paramount and United Artists to end the creative careers of morally deviant directors marks me as complicit, or hypocritical. However, media spin isn’t reason enough for me to boycott a film. To those of you who do, I salute you. Now let me enjoy my popcorn.