Late last year, a who’s who of Manhattan’s literary elite attended an event for the kink-positive sex and dating app Feeld – and there in the corner of a room, between the canapés and the erotica, was none other than Woody Allen. The society pages of the New York Post offered little more on this surreal public appearance than the fact that it had happened, that Allen had been invited by his friend, the writer Daphne Merkin, and that he “didn’t stay for long”. Still, does it matter? “Woody Allen shocks by showing up at sex app party” is the sort of scoop that warrants applause, a slap on the back, and a free drink at the bar.
Today, Allen is 89, not really working, and not really cancelled. The #MeToo moment in 2017 did lead to the resurfacing of sexual abuse allegations made in 1992 by his daughter Dylan Farrow (which he’s repeatedly denied, while several investigations into the claim have brought no charges), but it’s tricky to spot any long-term effects, despite critics of the #MeToo movement often describing Allen as one of its “victims”. If anything, the filmmaker has become a bit of a cultural jump-scare. He’s never particularly asked after, but still has a tendency to pop up in places where you’d least expect him – podcasts, festivals, cinema listings if you’re travelling on the continent. Ironically, considering Allen spoke last week about once having worked with Donald Trump on a film, it’s similar to the effect of seeing the man who would later become US president in Home Alone 2, or walking by in an episode of Sex and the City. How on earth did that happen, you find yourself asking.
Allen has emerged from semi-exodus twice in the last few weeks, first as a guest of honour at a Moscow film festival (yikes), where he was Zoomed in from New York to answer questions, and then as a guest on a podcast hosted by the increasingly “anti-woke” US media personality Bill Maher (again, yikes). But while on paper these two venues hint at a turn to the political right, Allen himself seems unmoved – there is no bitterness on display, no resentment, no capitulating to the dominant powers in American public life right now. Instead he leads with a signature ambivalence, and it’s quite fascinating to witness.
I do not recommend sitting through the entirety of the Maher appearance, mainly because it consists of the host insisting to Allen’s face how Allen himself should feel, for 91 minutes. But it is curious to see Allen choose repeatedly not to take the bait. Whenever Maher declares (over and over) that Allen was the victim of a “leftist witch hunt” in 2017, Allen shrugs. He actually found it “very interesting and amusing”, he replies. “I had done so many movies and had accumulated enough personal financial resources so that I wasn’t hurt by it.”
It raises an interesting point about “cancel culture”. Whatever the Mahers of the world proclaim, if the person who has supposedly been cancelled doesn’t loudly state that they’ve been cancelled – on every platform that could ever host them – has the cancellation even taken place? “I don’t think about it,” Allen said in 2023, ahead of the Venice Film Festival premiere of his most recent movie, a dismal black comedy called Coup de Chance. “I don’t know what it means to be cancelled. I know that, over the years, everything has been the same for me. I make my movies.”
Unusually, the only real difference between the Allen of today and the Allen of 20 years ago is the volume of his output. Where once the filmmaker was known for firing out at least one film a year, he has recently slowed: Coup de Chance and the baffling film-industry satire Rifkin’s Festival are his only two movies this decade so far. He is otherwise just as detached from the industry as he’s always been, keeping Hollywood at arm’s length regardless of its own historic eagerness to worship at his feet. Despite being nominated for 24 Oscars over the course of his career (and winning four), Allen has famously only attended an Academy Awards ceremony once, in 2002, to urge filmmakers to continue filming in his typical geographical and creative base of New York after 9/11.
His work, too, is just as crude and tedious as it’s been for most of his late career. Even before the allegations resurfaced, Allen seemed to attract financing out of a kind of cultural loyalty, buoyed by the eagerness of major movie stars to get a Woody Allen credit on their filmography – whatever the quality of the material itself. It’s how Kate Winslet ended up in the laborious Coney Island drama Wonder Wheel (2017), or how Timothée Chalamet and Selena Gomez led his icky teen romcom A Rainy Day in New York (2019), currently his last film paid for solely by American money. Remember that strange period between 2014 and 2015 in which Emma Stone, presumably searching for a consistent collaborator and not yet introduced to Yorgos Lanthimos, made back-to-back movies with him? I imagine Stone is hoping you don’t.
At a push, you can say that Allen has made three good movies this century, each one enlivened more by its performances than by the filmmaking – the Cate Blanchett showcase Blue Jasmine (2013), the sophisticated love-quadrangle dramedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), and the bustling, time-travel soufflé Midnight in Paris (2011). The other 18 he’s made have been various shades of dire, from the initially praised but in hindsight drab noir pastiche Match Point (2005), to the ones barely released – the psychic trifle You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), the Woody-gone-blind farce Hollywood Ending (2002), the magician mystery Scoop (2006), and the list goes on. All are minor ghost images of his greatest hits, made with almost startling carelessness. I am still spooked by a scene left intact in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger in which the Slumdog Millionaire actor Frieda Pinto seems to stumble over her lines, leaving her frozen in dead air.
It is true that the culture surrounding Allen has shifted in the last decade – how else to explain why Dylan Farrow’s allegations did the most significant reputational damage amid #MeToo, rather than the more tabloidy and ultimately vaporous media storm they sparked in the early Nineties? But even the idea of Allen as a disgraced persona non grata feels slightly archaic now. His films are still financed, his 2020 memoir Apropos of Nothing was speedily picked up by a new publisher after being dropped by its original publishers at Hachette, and his first novel, What’s with Baum?, is out this month. And while there have always been actors who’ve stood by him – notably Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem – others have had second thoughts after distancing themselves from him at the height of #MeToo. Rebecca Hall, who donated her salary for A Rainy Day in New York in 2018, has since taken back her regrets about working with him. “I don’t think it’s the responsibility of his actors to speak to that situation,” she told The Observer last year.
And then there’s Allen himself, who has coasted over all of this without really saying a word – a right-wing symbol of the censorious woke left, who stubbornly refuses to be symbolised. It’d almost be impressive, if the whole thing wasn’t quite so grubby.
In his Maher episode, Allen joked (sort of) that he planned on dying soon, and I’m convinced that, with every additional day he lives, the murkiness that has long shadowed him will get less foggy – actors will come back around to him, obituaries will focus less on his later years, and the revolt against the hopes and dreams of #MeToo will get louder. And between the sex app parties and the demonstrative indifference he displays in every public appearance, Allen will become less a cinematic boogeyman than a bit of kooky New York wallpaper. Who saw that one coming?
