A Stardust Memory

Some artists have a way of creeping into your personal life, and Woody is one of those to me. My Dad was from Brooklyn around the same time of Woody Allen, and my Mom always used to think he acted exactly like Woody Allen. "Your Dad is just like Woody Allen and you're just like your Dad," she said, and considering he left her when she was pregnant for another woman, he became the root of all her suffering, and this wasn't a good comparison. At the same time, Woody Allen was a cultural zeitgeist in the late '70's and like everyone she liked some of his movies, but what she did was make Woody Allen larger than life to me, in a way that a movie screen can only dream. I became Woody, Woody became me, I was my Dad, my Dad was me, I wasn't my Mom, my Mom wasn't me, and my Dad wasn't around to defend himself. The problem of being a child in a divorce with a bitter Mother is that you take on the sins of the Father, and if you're childhood isn't happy you'll romanticize the missing parent. It didn't hurt that my Dad was a charming funny womanizer who resembled me more temperamentally, but to say I was my Dad would be as true as saying I was my Mom. No child is their parent though we come from there, though we end up somewhere very different.

I don't have a clear relationship to Woody Allen's movies, even though I was stigmatized by them through my parents. The first one I remember seeing on the big screen was "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy," when it came out. My parents (not my Dad, he's pretty cheap), used to give me $10 or $15 to spend the day in Westwood, and this would incorporate a taco or two, some video games, and maybe a matinee. I saw "Midsummer" in a matinee and I remember coming out of the theater and feeling like I'd just seen a really good flick, and felt adult. Woody was intellectual and that I liked the movie at all meant I was in a secret club, like people liking the same book, and I was happy, but he wasn't my guy, or my director. Shit, I was just a kid, and I don't think I'd started having favorite directors, or screenwriters, until I went to college, so I was free of all the useless criticism that has come to define my generation. But I can tell you straight out that "Baby It's You," "The Outsiders," "Valley Girl," "This is Spinal Tap," "Poltergeist," or dozens more meant way more to me than a Woody Allen movie has ever meant, and I'm sure Woody would understand.

The first and only Woody Allen movie I really called my own was "Stardust Memories," and it may be the only one I'll ever call my own. I'm sure due to my childhood and my nature I was obsessed by the 'mid-life crisis' when I was a kid, a term that I'm sure the Boomers made up to describe what they felt after the '60's, when they lost all meaning in their life, and tried to fill it up with an endless pursuit of junk food and money, creature comforts. The only story I tried writing in high school was about a group of middle aged men coming together for a sort of men's club reunion that of course would turn into a cathartic dramatic blood bath over some lost secret between friends, but the story never got far enough for me to get there. I don't think I was the only troubled Gen X adolescent to obsess on a mid life crisis, and we have our parents to thank for that, the divorce generation, who we got to intimately watch going through a mid-life crisis without any of the grace of their parents, the WW II generation. Of course, we weren't going through a mid-life crisis as teenagers, since we were, well.... teenagers.... but we were absorbing the crisis head-on. There were several 'men's club' type movies on Z channel that I found strangely compelling, though I wouldn't talk about them with friends at school, since they weren't made for us. "Shoot the Moon," was one of my very favorites, and in second place would probably be "Stardust Memories." I really got that movie since it was Woody's homage to 8 1/2, my Dad's favorite movie, that I'd yet to see.

I'm not sure I have much to say about "Stardust" and that may be for the best. I'm so sick of classifying and categorizing Woody Allen's movies, I can't even begin to tell you, but that's what happens when an artist infiltrates your life, and turns it upside down. I already wrote a long blog doing this and I doubt there is much reason to try again. "Stardust Memories" was Woody Allen's most misunderstood movie at the time, and I'm sure this is partly why I liked it. It was one of the only times in his storied career that the critics turned against him, and wanted the funny Woody, or at least a Woody who wasn't down on being funny, and that was funny. The critics wanted a dramedy like Woody had started to give them with "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan" but he didn't have that in him and was all but telling the critics and audience in the movie, that he didnt' have that in him, and no one likes being told they can't order a dish at a restaurant they used to like. The public wanted a younger Woody and that was done forever.

I grew into Woody Allen as a young adult when his movies became synonymous with quality and intellect, and pretty much liked them. I thought "Crimes and Misdemeanors" was great, "Hannah and her Sisters," a disappointment, and "The Purple Rose of Cairo," a real gem. I compared Woody Allen to Martin Scorsese, Coppola, Kubrick, and the other great filmmakers of the day, and got a real adult appreciation of his art, but I wasn't living for Woody Allen. I thought Scorsese's movies were way better, but Woody developed a real personal style in the '80's that may have been the peak of the dramedy. A lot of directors tried to imitate him, but few got the feel, though Josh Mills's rememberance of "A Little Romance" today reminded me of how popular Woody Allen's Americanizations of Trouffaut had become. I was young and must've thought my adult love for Woody Allen would go on forever, just like it did for all my other favorite directors, whose names I learned, and who also never seemed to let me down. But Woody let everyone down in ways that went so much further than a run of bad movies it would be hard to quantify. He left Mia Farrow for their adopted daughter in the early '90's and his face was splashed all over America as an amoral creep. Ironically or not, Woody's movies also started becoming awful during this time. I remember reading a Rolling Stone interview where he said the point of movies was to entertain, not to make people think, or to depress people, and that he wasn't going to be doing serious movies anymore. It was the exact opposite of how Sandy Bates thought in "Stardust Memories," and exactly the opposite of how I'd imagine Woody was thinking through the '80's, when he made a number of heavy moral dramas. I don't think a creative Woody Allen has emerged from his marriage to Sun-Yi, or maybe he was at the end of his greatness, but it's funny timing.

It's one thing to have an artist you admire slip into mediocrity, and another thing to have their personal life intrude on yours, and I'm afraid that's what Woody Allen has managed to do for a generation. His moral life became more complicated with allegations from Dylan Farrow of pedophilia, that seem pretty well substantiated to me, but I'm not a lawyer or a judge. Still, Woody is going to go down as one of the greatest pervs in Hollywood history, and that's not how he seemed through the '70's and '80's. He was the 'new man' Miranda July wrote about and every intellectual white woman's dream date. He was also that guy who couldn't stay true to anyone and who my Mom told me I was just like via my Father, so to have Woody's dubious moral behavior thrown into the mix right when I was starting adulthood was very confusing. I didn't defend him, I don't think, but I'm not sure I judged him harshly enough, since my morally dubious parents taught me to divorce the art from the artist, a wise aesthetic lesson, but not necessarily a wise spiritual one.

A Woody Allen movie is now a pre-packaged product, with the same credits rolling over the same Dixie time jazz everytime, making all and any criticism pretty pointless. The confusion Allen felt towards his audience in "Stardust" has become outright contempt and I really think Woody gets a perverse pleasure out of being a critic's darling and not even having to try to entertain people who pay hard earned money to see half baked movie after half baked movie crumble after the first bite, or the first act. Woody reminds me a lot of Bill Clinton during the intern blow job scandal, when rank and file Democrats ran to Bill Clinton's defense, because the Republicans desire to impeach him over it was unconstitutional and insane. Woody has put his fans in the same horrible position: either they defend a potential pedophile who also and unquestionably committed a form of incest by marrying his adopted daughter, or they defend him to the death, because they are Woody, and Woody is them. Clearly, I have no desire to defend the guy since I've already taken so much shit from my Mom for being like him that there is nothing to defend.