And were these proudly objective viewers really being as objective as they thought? Woody Allen’s usual genius is one of self-indictment, and in Manhattan he stumbles at a crucial hurdle of self-indictment, and also he fucks a teenager, and that’s the film that gets called a masterpiece? What exactly are these guys defending? Is it the film? Or something else? I think Manhattan and its pro-girl anti-woman story would be upsetting even if Hurricane Soon-Yi had never made landfall, but we can’t know, and there lies the very heart of the matter.
