Silent screams in space

(From YouTube notes about Lost Cosmonaut video, posted above):

This is a supposed recording of a Soviet space flight in 1961. In it, a Russian woman can be heard complaining about the increasing temperature inside the craft before it is destroyed attempting re-entry.

This was recorded by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers in 1961. It is reportedly one of many transmissions intercepted by the two brothers that prove the existence of the lost cosmonauts.

The following is a translation of what the woman is saying:

five...four...three ...two...one...one
two...three...four...five...
come in... come in... come in...
LISTEN...LISTEN! ...COME IN!
COME IN... COME IN... TALK TO ME!
TALK TO ME!... I AM HOT!... I AM HOT!
WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... WHAT?...
FORTYFIVE?... FIFTY?...
YES...YES...YES... BREATHING...
BREATHING... OXYGEN...
OXYGEN... I AM HOT... (THIS)
ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...
ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...
YES...YES...YES... HOW IS THIS?
WHAT?... TALK TO ME!... HOW SHOULD I
TRANSMIT? YES...YES...YES...
WHAT? OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR
TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR
TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... YES... I FEEL HOT...
I FEEL HOT... IT'S ALL... IT'S HOT...
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT...
... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... WHAT?...
I CAN SEE A FLAME!... I CAN SEE A
FLAME!...
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... THIRTYTWO...
THIRTYTWO... FORTYONE... FORTYONE

AM I GOING TO CRASH?... YES...YES... I FEEL HOT!...
I FEEL HOT!... I WILL REENTER!... I WILL REENTER...
I AM LISTENING!... I FEEL HOT!...

OK, gentle readers. So what's my take on all this? I found this eerie recording on a Top 10 List of Eerie Recordings (from a site called Top 10 Lists of. . .), and haven't been able to stop listening to it. I couldn't even get to sleep last night, it creeped me out so much.

Way leads on to way, and I found much more information about these notorious Judica Brothers, along with a million mostly-amateurish-and-absurd conspiracy-theory videos claiming the moon landing of 1969 was a complete hoax. The best of these is a clever satire (taken seriously by many, which was the whole point: to show how naive and idiotic these theories are) called Dark Side of the Moon. Watch it if you are at all interested in this subject, as it will show you how "convincing" these arguments can be (until they collapse in a heap of incoherence, or perhaps sardonic laughter).

So how valid is this claim that two young Italian guys, obviously smart and innovative, were able to pull down signals and even voices from remote space using cobbled-together, Heathkit-like amateur equipment? The documentary I watched, Space Hackers, makes a convincing case. There is no doubt that these guys were brilliant, and since two heads are better than one, they joined forces in an odd sort of fused-together, codependent manner. Suffice it to say they didn't get out much, and would have fit in nicely on The Big Bang Theory.

All this started with the commonly-heard beeps of Sputnik, the first Soviet satellite launched in 1957 (which I remember, though I was only 3 years old at the time: my brother Walt, a science junkie, dragged us all up on the roof of my father's store with a powerful telescope to try to see Sputnkik, which we didn't. Then we all went out and had a Spudnut, so that I forever confused the satellite with a doughnut hurtling through space.)

OK. . . confusing stuff, but some of it is compelling. Sputnik was just a start: the Judica brothers then supposedly picked up the heartbeat of Laika, the doomed dog the Russians shot into space. Then morse code SOS signals that read like howls of agony in the inferno. Mumblings from cosmonauts, full of suppressed panic, most of them in hopeless peril. The gasps, rapid heartbeat and what sounded like the death-rattle of another cosmonaut. And on it goes.

It's all Caught On Tape, folks, and last night, recovering from the worst migraine I've had in years, I was in an Oliver Sacks-ish state that can only be described as altered consciousness, my neural wiring sticking out all over my head and audibly sizzling.  (As a means of enlightenment, I don't recommend this, because it hurts like hell and makes you throw up). So I watched all kinds of things, including something that totally debunked the Judica brothers' recordings - or most of them - as fakes.

It's true that the female cosmonaut in the video I posted doesn't sound like she's speaking in the terse, formal military language of space - but was it in place back in 1961? And was it common to send women into space back then? Well, they sent a dog. The Americans sent a chimpanzee. Maybe she was the next logical step before they risked sending a man. (The photos, by the way, depict the official "first woman in space", Valentina Tereshkova, launched a few years later after they had got the major bugs out of the system: i.e. re-entry without hurtling back to earth in a blob of molten metal.)

The Judicas had an enigmatic, playful quality about them (but then, doesn't Howard Wolowitz with his dickies and his brisket and his Billie-Burke-ish girl friend also strike you as a bit dippy?). Nevertheless, as the brothers' notoriety grew in the Italian press, NASA invited them for a "friendly" visit to headquarters so that they could pose a few "friendly" questions.

Their answers are nowhere on the record, nor do we know of any attempts to harness their amateur brilliance in the service of spying on the Soviets.  It could be they were dismissed as chippers with a vivid imagination and a love of publicity. Maybe they were just attempting to score some chicks.

But if these guys really did even a fraction of what they claimed, it's astonishing.  At one point they were supposedly able to compress a long series of secret signals broadcast from Russia - a code no one could crack - and found that it was, in fact, a few phrases of music taken from the opera Boris Gudenov. (No relation to Boris Badenov of Rocky and His Friends. Come to think of it, that IS a weird coincidence.) Another time they were able (supposedly) to crack a band of frequency by calculating the exact length of an antenna they saw in a photograph.

Or. . . are they having us on, after all?

There are those who believe we went to the moon. There are those who believe we went there, but didn't land and come back because it was technically impossible. There are those who believe we had to fill that visual gap somehow (with footage shot by Stanley Kubrick?). There are those who debunk, and those who debunk the debunkers. It becomes very convoluted, to the point that an obvious satire like Dark Side of the Moon (a sendup of the "I want to believe" earnestness of those conspiracy nuts) is taken at face value.

In some cases, it just makes people angry. "Those people (the filmmakers) were lying to us! Henry Kissinger did NOT say those things!"  This speaks volumes about the IQ level of the average citizen. Like Brontosaurus, maybe their brains are in their butts.

So what do I think? Oh, I don't know. I watched the "moon shot" from a cottage on Lake of Bays, at Bondi Resort, a heavenly sort of place that nevertheless didn't have TVs, so we had to borrow one from somewhere. We had a wine-and-cheese party to celebrate the event, and suffice it to say I didn't pay much attention to the cheese.

My parents had allowed me to have wine with dinner since age 13, and after a gruelling Oxfam walk my Dad brought a glass up to my room containing a couple of ounces of Scotch mixed with orange juice.  But this time I was drunk, really drunk, though I was only 15 years old. My parents kept filling up my wine glass over and over again, and when they cut me off, my much-older siblings kept right on pouring until I was stupefied. They must have thought that seeing me drunk was kind of cute, like watching a monkey that had got hold of a bottle of beer.  After all that one-small-step-for-man business by Neil Armstrong (which should have been "a man," not that anyone cared), I remember lying on a hillside staring up at white-hot stars, disturbingly close, that wheeled and whirled like something out of Van Gogh.

Back then we all took this moon shot stuff at face value, of course. But one reason all these theories (most of them loony) are popping up now is that we're starting to realize how incredibly primitive the equipment was that launched these guys, got them to the moon and (even more incredibly) brought them back. The average SmartPhone has a thousand times more computer juice, a quantum leap (if you'll pardon the expression) beyond that dinosaur technology with its hair-raising risks.

Really, shouldn't all of them have blown up? Weird, isn't it. Just a coincidence? Sheer luck? Why did two Challenger missions end in flaming disaster, when the only Gemini/Apollo fatalities took place on the ground? (And just what did Gus Grissom have to hide? Jesus, I've got to get off this subject.)

Think of it now. What if those men had landed, made their historic moon walk and dramatic pronouncements, then couldn't get back? (My husband the science wiz, who seems to have inside information about some of this stuff, tells me that each astronaut was given a cyanide capsule before they launched.) I think even Walter Cronkite would have been at a loss for words.

The deeper you delve into all this shit, the crazier you feel. I am certain that NASA, not to mention the Soviets, did some spin on this stuff, maybe hid some things, minimized them or downplayed them. It's more likely the Soviets did coverups, just because of the nature of the Iron Curtain culture (which, by the way, I thought was a literal iron curtain, kind of like the Great Wall of China. Well, I was five.) There are those people who seem to think everything to do with government and/or the military is a conspiracy: it fills the endless hours while they wait for a girl friend (someone ditzy enough to tolerate all this shit). Oh, bring back the X Files, please.

Meanwhile we have this haunting, almost pleading voice, repetitious, so blurry it could mean almost anything. We hear what we want to hear. My own brother had Heathkits and telescopes and bunsen burners (which we used to melt lead, I am not kidding, I did it at age eight). It was trendy then to be an amateur scientist, a space geek. I married one, after all.

The documentary I saw was very strange because the brothers, now old men, still have all their dusty, creaking old equipment with the dials and chugging reel-to-reel tape recorders.  The men seem like relics who haven't kept up, their one encapsulated moment of fame now stowed in a museum of obsolescence.

And yet, and yet. At one point there was some film footage of their "antenna", or at least one of them. I expected a rod with a little bulb on it. You know, an antenna. But this was a massive structure that spread out to cover the roof of their subversive little lab. It looked like a space station up there. How had they figured that out? You couldn't get that shit from a hardware store, now could you?

To hear these old men speak, which they did in Italian with subtitles, was sheer poetry. They described how the American press dismissively thought of them as "just pizza and mandolins". Einstein (whose theory of relativity was obviously a load of conspiracy-driven bullshit) would have appreciated this. Enigmatic, rumpled, otherworldly as E.T., he had that same dreamy, subversive quality, the uncanny power of men who have stared into space, reached out in childish curiosity and pulled down the stars.

(Note. This is a summer repeat of one of my, well, don't I have the right to think so?, best pieces. It isn't really summer, but this sure is a repeat. But it's my birthday, and I can do anything I want. And if *I* didn't remember it, YOU sure as shit won't.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Love and Betrayal: The Mia Farrow Story (1995)

This incredibly strange artifact from the mid-'90s is due to resurface in a big way, and in fact I'm surprised it hasn't up to now. (Am I the first to notice?) It's an awful soaper, poorly-acted and melodramatic, and clearly takes sides against Woody (so maybe he's trying to somehow keep it out of public view? Fat chance!). But as a curiosity, it's very. . . curious. Obviously a poorly-made TV movie wouldn't hurt Woody Allen one bit, nor will any of the crap that's going on right now, as abusive patriarchs virtually always walk free, their reputations only enhanced by "restoring their good name".

Facebook is crawling with this awful stuff now (round 2 of what Allen has always called the 'What Scandal?'), and it's horribly fascinating. Did Woody "do it"? Well, what does "do" mean? It is painfully obvious that he did things to Dylan that were intrusive and damaging to a little girl's boundaries/self-esteem. To muddy the waters, Mia Farrow KNEW he was doing those things, and aside from making him go to therapy to "deal with his feelings about Dylan," she did nothing to stop him. She saw him making Dylan suck his thumb (one of the creepiest things I've ever heard of), saw him lie with his head in her lap, facing her, so that his face would be buried in her crotch. And his hairs were found in that infamous attic, to which Allen replied (after lying that he'd never been in there), "I might have stuck my head in there."

I think the public has always seen Mia Farrow as something of a saint, taking impoverished, damaged Third World children into her home to give them a second chance. All very admirable, but that doesn't change the fact that she stayed with a creepy, abusive man for twelve years in the face of dozens of red flags. And it doesn't change the fact that she may have stayed with him  to keep her newly-revived career going. Allen had crowned her the new Diane Keaton, a heady position indeed, but it's just one of the strange things he likes to do with chicks. They're his little dolls, and he can manipulate them any way he wants, professionally, sexually, any-old-way. It makes my blood run cold.

But sometimes these things don't stay buried, and the fallout is generally awful for everyone (see Michelle Phillips and her sad attempt to "heal" her family, blowing the whole thing to pieces). Is there a way to win? Not by soapboxing on either side. Maybe by crawling up out of the muck and leading a satisfying life?

Be happy. Drives your enemies crazy.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The "stretchy-seat" paradox

There's this weird, oh, I don't know, thing. This paradox. We generally assume, most of us, that being gay in the 1950s was horribly stigmatized, even persecuted, something you had to scrupulously hide in case you were "found out".

You had to be "manly", meaning devoid of any sort of attraction to your own sex. The pressure was enormous. You had to line yourself up with movie stars like Rock Hudson (oops) and Raymond Burr (double-oops), who were then believed to be rampantly heterosexual.

SO WHAT'S THIS SHIT ALL ABOUT?

These are men's underwear ads, presumably from the 1950s, in which men are in such blatantly homoerotic positions that it just makes you wonder. Is this just  "oh, surely not", or a "hey, they're just joshing around" kind of thing?

But think about it. Back then we had male comedy teams like Martin and Lewis, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. (Crosby and Danny Kaye, later "outed" as gay, even appeared in drag in White Christmas.) We had singing duos who came on Ed Sullivan - what the hell was the name of that duo? I'll have to look it up AGAIN, even though I've looked it up 27 times before. (Sandler and Young.)

But none of them appeared in these kinds of poses, like the one below, with the guy on the left just waiting to be serviced by the other guy, who seems to be getting down on his knees. This ad must have been designed by somebody like Sal Romano from Mad Men, who had to sublimate his illicit passions into his artwork.

Maybe people were gay-blind then. Or they are now, when looking back. Surely it meant something else to bandy about terms like "stretchy-seat"? We just assume everybody was clean-cut and devoid of any non-Doris-Day-humping impulses back then. In fact, if these ads are any indication, it looks like there was lots of very public boy-on-boy action going on, and it was considered completely OK. Stuff that today would make people squirm.

Like this.

These are ads for a sort of one-piece spandex jumpsuit/panty-girdle for men, with legs in it. Presumably there was a fly in them somewhere (there's some mention of a horizontal fly, a bizarre concept if ever there was one, reminding me for some reason of a sideways vagina), or maybe you just wriggled them down like women did. They had a patented "stretchy-seat" in them (no kidding!) that presumably gave a little testicular support during spontaneous wrestling matches on the living room floor. This was strong enough to contain the most explosive fart, and could not (presumably) be penetrated from the outside. I don't know if the one-piece "union suit" design ever caught on - it's hard to believe that a man would render himself that inaccessible, unless dry humping was the preferred method.

(Transcript of dialogue)

"Old Flappy-Pants-Pappy Himself!"

Pete: Can the comedy, will you? These suit me, and I like 'em. . . get it? They're Munsingwear "BREEX". They're bias-cut, with as much room and comfort behind as anybody needs. . . and what about that stingy little number you got on?

Mac: Stingy, my eye! You mean streamlined, modern. . . what a getting-around guy needs. Munsingwear, too. . . these SKIT-Shorts, with the new, easy "Stretchy-Seat" that stretches up and down.

(Transcript of dialogue)

Fred:  Gladiator! Stick to your putting! Nothing could be more comfortable than these SKIT-Trunks! They're brief enough. . . without making you look as if you'd joined a nudist colony!

Pete: Oh, yeah? Well. . . next to my skin I like air. Look at the leg-room here! And these give mild support, too!

It's strange, because I can't imagine the gayest man in the world (Elton John?) discussing "leg-room" and "mild support" (not to mention "stretchy-seat") with ANYONE, even the cutest pool-boy in the world. It's just so. . . not even gay - it's something else - just. . . disturbing.

Yet it's obvious it isn't meant to be gay. I mean, they wouldn't. I mean. . . would they?

I swear, this guy's butt looks like something out of an old Playtex girdle ad from the 1960s. Unless he has a thigh problem, and men don't usually have cellulite, I just don't get the shorts-like design of these. In fact I don't see how ANYONE could wear one of these, except maybe Ed Wood in his Glen or Glenda phase. He might get in a car accident, after all, and the doctor pronouncing him dead would see it.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Falling in love again, never wanted to

Marlene Dietrich isn't my favorite (that would be Anthony Perkins), but these are nothing short of gorgeous. And they don't go on and on in baroque fashion, like the ones I make. The first and last ones are my favorites.

People you know very well

(From the Gospel According to Facebook, chapter 946, verse 22:)

Adding Friends/Friend Requests

Adding Friends

How do I add a friend?

A quick way to add your friends is to import your contacts. You can also add friends from their Timelines:

1. Search for the person you'd like to friend using the search bar at the top of any Facebook page.
2. Click on their name to go to their Timeline.
3. Click the Add Friend button next to their name. You might not see this button on some people's Timelines, depending on their privacy settings.

Once this person accepts your request, they'll show up in your Facebook friends list.

Note: If you've been temporarily blocked from adding new friends, you'll need to wait until the block is finished. Learn more.

You're reading the Desktop Help answer. Learn more in our other Help Centers.

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Who should I send friend requests to?

You should send friend requests to people you have a real-life connection to, like your friends, family, coworkers or classmates.

If you're interested in receiving updates from people you find interesting, but don't know personally (ex: journalists, celebrities, political figures), try following them instead of sending them friend requests.

(Emphasis mine.)

OK, so this is the official word.

Then why do I know so many people who have literally THOUSANDS of Facebook friends?

If I ask anyone about this, they quickly look away and change the subject. Myself, I've received stern warnings  about "friending" people I don't "have a real-life connection to", and have even been threatened I'll be cut off Facebook forever if I even think of approaching someone in my field whom I merely admire. The shaming and even mildly threatening tone of these warnings is really something else. 

So how do these people make over a thousand (or two, or three, up to FIVE thousand) close, personal friends without being cut off like I almost was?

Inquiring minds want to know.

But no one, NOT ONE person, not even Google will tell me what is going on here. I've tried and tried, but apparently it doesn't happen.  Did each of those, say, 3000 people receive a friend request from someone they have a real-life connection with? A close friend or at least a colleague? I've never met that many people in my entire life. Not only that, carefully friending people one by one would be a mighty slow process, unless you're so gol-dern popular that friend requests just come flooding in every day.

The message seems to be: OK, Margaret, once again, you have no friends because nobody likes you. If they liked you, thousands of friends would be magnetically attracted to you with no effort on your part at all. In fact, the entire world would decide in unison that it liked you. But no, Margaret. It's not like that. Not for you.

You DON'T have 3000 or 4000 Facebook "friends" and you never will. Even if you approach someone you DO know well, and for some reason they don't respond right away (i. e. they almost never check their Facebook page), it will appear on a list that will some day flash in your face: all those requests you sent that were "refused". This is seen as a security issue and leads to stern warnings that you are about to be thrown out of Facebook.

The real reason being, not that you have TOO MANY friends, but that you have NOT ENOUGH friends and aren't cool enough, not knowing enough to stay on-board. It's the bloody schoolyard all over again.

So most people just sit there while wave upon wave of closepersonalfriend requests billow in daily. That doesn't happen to me.

I am also on LinkedIn, and joined in an attempt to find a person I needed to talk to. This time, surprisingly, I wasn't punished, but I don't know WHY I wasn't. I get "link requests", or whatever they are called, at least every week, if not every day. In most cases I have never even heard of these people, and I have no idea where and how they found my name.

I've tried this myself, and it never works. I get another stern finger-shaking warning. To "link" with someone, you have to know them well and have their email address. That's the rule. In other words, to be in touch with them, you already have to be in touch with them. It's a security thing, see.

Is this hypocrisy, or what? Why am I the ONLY person I have ever known who even talks about all this? If I had someone's email, I would never bother to "link" with them because I AM ALREADY LINKED WITH THEM! It's kind of like Facebook, you see, a hopeless Catch-22 that nobody else ever mentions because they are comfortably "in", and don't want to do anything to threaten that position (i. e. consort with someone who is hopelessly "out").

I had the thought, once, upon seeing someone on my page with something like 3,120 "friends", that there must be a whole lotta cheatin' going on. Bribes, maybe? The person never strikes me as a celebrity, in fact many of them look like ordinary schlubs. Like me. So there must be a way around the stern, quasi-legal warnings about "security", the implication that you might only have "one more chance" to make good before you are drummed out of the club forever.

I am a hopeless dinosaur, I know it, and any attempt to join in will be seen as a pathetic effort to be "cool" when it is patently obvious I don't belong here and never will. The harder I try, the more pathetic I look.

And that's just the way it is.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The unknown Harold Lloyd: Court House Crooks, 1915

I'd heard rumors, but I had never actually seen Harold Lloyd in a Mack Sennett comedy. He spent a year in the studio back in 1915, long before his heyday, taking minor roles while on strike from the Hal Roach studio, which refused to pay him $10 a week because they didn't feel his efforts were worth it. Seemed too good to be true at first, but the more you look at his character, the more you realize it couldn't be anyone else. It's a bit startling to see him without the glasses - he had wonderful eyes that were usually obscured, sexy eyes I always thought, a bit seductive - and to see him just so young, maybe 21 or 22. A boy. The extremely heavy white makeup is typical of the era when people's faces tended to disappear on film.

This wasn't all that easy to gif, and at first it wouldn't at all. He does appear in this picture a lot, but in snippets and little bursts of chase-scenes that last a couple of seconds. I'm having trouble setting up the Gifsforum with the bar, and you can't set exact coordinates or it doesn't work. My beloved old Y2GIF, the one I started on, doesn't work for me at all now.

So for now, this is the best I can do. Say good night, Harold.

Post-blog Notes. Yes, this is definitely Harold, though his face looks strange with no glasses and an inch of white makeup. The way he runs away is Harold-esque, the way he pulls the guy's hat down. . . His body language has that mercurial quality. Funny that he's buried in this, as he was in most of the Sennett comedies he made before ascending to greatness.

Got to start somewhere.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

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Woody Allen: creepier and creepier

Blogger's note: This is just a little piece that ran in Esquire, an update of a much earlier article that must have been ignored at the time. I remember trying to watch Hannah and her Sisters again a few years ago and having to turn it off because of all the child-molesting jokes. Yes, jokes. While this isn't legal proof that Woody Allen is a pedophile, it does reveal a sickening and stomach-turningly insensitive attitude towards the most horrific form of child abuse. 

That astonishing "oh, you were lucky, I WISH I had been molested" attitude is something I have actually heard people say. Everybody knows they enjoy it, after all. So it's no big deal, even pleasurable for them (or, even better, it initiates them into sex, which is doing them a favor).

What has always struck me about sexual abuse is that people can look right at it and not see it. When a lot of women and men stepped forward in the '80s and '90s to claim they had been psychologically devastated by incest, a juggernaut called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation sprang up to run them over. 

To some degree, it worked, but I can't help but notice a persistent theme in reality TV shows, the kind that feature people who weigh 600 pounds and can't get out of bed, or live in a festering landfill of rats and garbage heaped to the ceiling. Almost all of them say they were molested as children. Either they all got together and formed a Let's Pretend We Were Molested club, or they are revealing the horrific psychological aftereffects of being violated, a force that leaves a legacy of jaw-droppingly extreme damage that can be permanently crippling.

We laughed at this stuff. Think of it. I don't know why - it was like laughing at holocaust victims (which some people also do). It was a way of acknowledging abuse and burying it at the same time, joking it away as trivial, so that even if it IS happening, it's no big deal.

Dylan Farrow's accusations are, in my mind, becoming more and more plausible. But what makes me furious are the statements I keep hearing: "We can't comment on this because nobody really knows what went on in that attic." It's a neat way of avoiding indicting a beloved and rich and powerful figure, while at the same time leaving Dylan's accusations in that hazy area of "false memories", memories that were "implanted" by her hysterical mother.

Two people know what happened - I believe - but for absolute certain, one does, and he was the one who held all the cards, a father-figure to Mia's children (in spite of his strenuous denials) for years. If he did those things that Dylan Farrow is talking about, he will never confess to it because he truly can't or won't see what all the fuss is about.

Re-Watching Woody Allen

The newly-chilling themes that you can see throughout his movies

By Stephen Marche on February 4, 2014

FEBRUARY 5, 2014: This post has been updated to include more examples from Woody Allen's films.

MICKEY: Why all of a sudden is the sketch dirty?
ED: Child molestation is a touchy subject, and the affiliates...
MICKEY: Read the papers, half the country's doing it!

ED:Yes, but you name names.

The above is from an early scene in Woody Allen's 1986 film, Hannah and Her Sisters. I've been thinking about it since reading Dylan Farrow's essay in The New York Times, accusing her adoptive father of molesting her when she was a child. The allegations are nothing new. Nobody except Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen knows what happened in that attic, and no one else ever will. But the sheer vividness with which Farrow recounts the experience, as well as the forum in which she does so, is enough to make even the most ardent fan reevaluate an artist's entire body of work, especially one as personal as Allen's.

So what happens when you go looking for evidence of sex crimes in Woody Allen movies? If you look, you find it, again, and again, and again.

Take this scene from Manhattan, when the Allen character, Isaac, introduces his new girlfriend to his friends.

YALE: Jesus, she's gorgeous.

ISAAC: But she's seventeen. I'm forty-two and she's seventeen. I'm older than her father. Do you believe that? I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father. That's the first time that phenomenon ever occurred in my life.

EMILY: He's drunk.

YALE: You're drunk. You know you should never drink.

ISAAC: Did I tell you that my ex-wife—

EMILY: Who, Tina?

ISAAC: My second ex-wife is writing a book about our marriage and the breakup…It's really depressing. You know she's going to give all those details out, all my little idiosyncrasies and my quirks and mannerisms. Not that I have anything to hide because, you know...but there are a few disgusting little moments that I regret.

How are we supposed to read "a few disgusting little moments that I regret" when Isaac is dating a girl still in high school? And what are we to make of the scene in Love and Death (1975), in which the wise Father Andre tells the Allen character, "I have lived many years and, after many trials and tribulations, I have come to the conclusion that the best thing is…blond twelve-year-old girls. Two of them, whenever possible”? Or this exchange from Stardust Memories (1980), in which the Allen character, Sandy, hints at incest when talking with his lover Dorrie about her father?

SANDY: What about you? Did you have a little crush on him? You can admit this to me if you like.

DORRIE: Sure, we had a little flirting.

SANDY: A little small flirt? Mother away getting shock treatment, and the only beautiful daughter home. Long lingering breakfasts with Dad.

In a later scene, Sandy and Dorrie have the following argument, while in the background a large newspaper headline on a wall reads "Incest between father's..."
SANDY: I'm not attracted to her. What are you talking about?DORRIE: Staring at her all through dinner. Giving each other looks.

SANDY: Stop it. She's fourteen. She's not even fourteen. She's thirteen and a half.

DORRIE: I don't care. I used to play those games with my father, so I know. I've been through all that.

SANDY: What games? You think I'm flirting with your kid cousin?

DORRIE: You smile at her.

SANDY: Yeah, I smile at her. I'm a friendly person. What do you want? She's a kid. This is stupid. I don't want to have this conversation.

DORRIE: Don't tell me it's stupid. I used to do that with my father across the table. All those private jokes. I know.

Incestuous themes—stated or implicit—seethe throughout the whole of Allen's career. Here's a snippet of dialogue from Honeymoon Motel, a one-act play produced three years ago:

FAY: I was a little girl. I had an Uncle Shlomo…

NINA: Oh Mom!

FAY: Three fingers, he tried to molest me. Suddenly, three fingers I feel fondling me—

JUDY: What's the three fingers got to do with it?

FAY: It's hard to explain, but most people get groped by five.

SAM (to FAY): At least you were molested. I didn't have sex till I was twenty-five—you were the first one.

That idea: that sexual exploitation and education are conjoined also runs through the Allen canon. In Whatever Works (2009), the Allen character (played by Larry David) marries a childlike twenty-one-year-old, returning to the basic romantic situation that has motivated Allen's work from the beginning, and which you can see even in Annie Hall (1977): A man educates the women he sleeps with. He raises them. Once they're raised, he's no longer interested.

So what are we supposed to do? Every comedian alive, every writer alive, has been influenced by Woody Allen. In a way, the dilemma this poses is nothing new. Artists can be scum. Every grownup knows this. Roman Polanski was convicted of violating a thirteen-year-old girl, but he still made Chinatown. A recent biography of the German essayist Walter Benjamin, a personal intellectual hero of mine, revealed that when it came to his wife and child, he was, not to put too fine a point on it, an irresponsible asshole. The first compiler of the tales of King Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory, was a well-known rapist. Separating the quality of the art from the life of the artist is necessary for anyone who wants to enjoy anything.

But with Woody Allen, such a separation is impossible, because his movies are so thoroughly about himself, and about his own condition, and, as it turns out, the moral universe in which he exists—one in which there is no expectation of justice. Consider the final conversation in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), in which the main character, Judah, tells his story of getting away with a terrible crime, disguising it as a movie he's pitching:

JUDAH: People carry awful deeds around with them. What do you expect him to do, turn himself in? This is reality. In reality, we rationalize. We deny or we couldn't go on living.

CLIFF: Here's what I would do. I would have him turn himself in. 'Cause then you see your story assumes tragic proportions. Because in the absence of a God or something, he is forced to assume that responsibility himself. Then you have tragedy.

JUDAH: But that's fiction. That's movies. I mean, you've seen too many movies. I'm talking about reality. If you want a happy ending you should go see a Hollywood movie.

Only in Allen's case, Hollywood isn't the bringer of false light, but a willing accomplice to darkness. The end of Dylan Farrow's letter, not anything said by Sarah Palin or any other Fox News commentator, is the most stinging indictment of Hollywood I have ever read:

What if it had been your child, Cate Blanchett? Louis CK? Alec Baldwin? What if it had been you, Emma Stone? Or you, Scarlett Johansson? You knew me when I was a little girl, Diane Keaton. Have you forgotten me?
Are you imagining that? Now, what's your favorite Woody Allen movie?

But it's not just Hollywood. It's the rest of us, too. What about those of us who are Woody Allen's fans? What the hell have we been watching all this time?

 Esquire's Woody Allen Profile From 1994

Read more: Rewatching Woody Allen - Dylan Farrow Woody Allen Movies - Esquire
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