Woody and Annie (and Others) Part I

‘I wish I could think of a positive point to leave you with. Will you take two negative points?’
Woody Allen, from his stand-up comedy routine (1964)

Consider the facts: French writer Annie Ernaux has an affair with a young man, thirty years her junior (she was fifty-four, he was twenty-four), and writes about it, in the recently published The Young Man. Therein, she flatly admits that she was simply using him solely for her own satisfaction, stating that she was with a younger man ‘so that I would not continually be looking at the timeworn face of a man my age, the face of my own aging. When A.’s face was before me, mine was young too. Men have known this forever, and I saw no reason to deprive myself.’ Also, ‘I felt as if I had been lying on a bed since age eighteen and never risen from it – the same bed but in different places, with different men, indistinguishable from one another.’ It is hailed as disarmingly honest in reclaiming female desire – as though we did not already know that women have always had desires, and do not really need to reclaim them because they never went away. Annie Ernaux is lauded. She has won the Nobel Prize, among other prestigious awards.

Then there is the case of North American filmmaker Woody Allen: he has an affair with a young woman, thirty-five years his junior (he was fifty-six, she was twenty-one), and despite the fact that they married five years later, and have since adopted two daughters, and been apparently happy in their union for twenty-six years and counting, he is vilified as a predatory creep and possible paedophile, constantly mentioned in the same breath as charged and/or convicted sex-offenders Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. He now has difficulty financing his films in his own country, and has to do so abroad – notably in France. Amazon refused to distribute his 2019 film, A Rainy Day in New York, as ‘unmarketable’, resulting in a law suit for breach of contract. While some famous actors have stood by him, singing his praises, others have rushed to distance themselves from him, making clear that they regret having worked with him, and would not do so again. His memoir Apropos of Nothing was dropped by his original publisher, after protests from his ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow and some members of her family, and a staff walkout at the publishing firm, although it was subsequently taken up by another house. He has been blacklisted, or in the parlance de nos jours, ‘cancelled’. (Amusing titbit: the contribution of Allen and his wife to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign was unceremoniously returned. The principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, and the requirement of due process, seemingly does not apply in Clinton’s legal framework.) This double standard needs scrutiny.

Rosita Sweetman says sexual abuse of women by powerful men is still endemic, but hails incredibly brave young women like Dylan Farrow for calling it out.https://t.co/JMu6e02KuU
@RositaSweetman #WoodyAllen #Metoo

— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) May 16, 2024

Obviously, there are additional factors which serve to place Allen in an unfavourable light, and can be used to justify the opprobrium he endures. For one, the young woman he took up with, Soon-Yi Previn, was the adopted daughter of that ex-girlfriend, Farrow, who was still at the time his current girlfriend. For another, and far more damaging to his reputation, he was accused by Farrow, in the aftermath of the Allen/Soon-Yi relationship becoming public knowledge in 1992, of molesting his and Farrow’s adopted daughter Dylan, then aged seven, an accusation which resurfaced in 2016 in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and a 2021 HBO documentary featuring interviews with Dylan, Allen v. Farrow. In fairness, Ernaux’s young paramour was a fan (a male groupie?), not an extended family member, and she has never been accused of sexually assaulting a seven-year-old boy, much less the adopted son of her then boyfriend. But, the key word in the previous sentence, to my mind, is ‘accused’. (Echoes resonate of the reflexively eponymous 1988 Jonathan Kaplan film, starring Jodie Foster, in which she portrays a rape victim who struggles to get justice. Who, exactly, was The Accused?) Allen has been accused, but never charged, much less convicted – unlike Cosby, Weinstein and Epstein.

It is not my intention here to delve into the copious mound of facts and opinions, claims and counterclaims, which surround this case, and are readily available elsewhere to those with the inclination to do the proper research. Such an approach would involve excessive quotation from the large swathes of television, newspaper and magazine interviews, statements and op. ed. pieces I have read (to say nothing of the social media onslaughts on either side), information which has long been in the public domain. The Allen/Farrow/Previn blended family imbroglio is too sad and sordid and multifaceted, the problems around the original accusation too byzantine – partaking of classical tragedy – to allow of a simple black and white interpretation, and we may never know the whole story, only the conflicting, partial versions. So I will be economical with my references, but hopefully not with the truth – as I see it. The trouble with presenting an argument from either side of this dispute is that, as with the majority of such issues, once a side is taken, all arguments become one-sided. However, while I hope to avoid the bulk of the ‘he said/she said’ discourse on this episode of the culture wars, I will allow myself the odd judgement, while trying to avoid being overly partisan. My own allegiances will soon become apparent, and in any case I have other matters to engage with here: mainly, societal attitudes to legal, large age gap relationships; and, also, the age old conundrum around the separation of the artist and the work.

Let us pull from the pile this quote, if only because it pithily summarises the vast and seemingly endless debate around the Allen/Farrow debacle. Daphne Merkin wrote in her profile of Soon-Yi (New York Magazine/Vulture, 17/09/2018):

With regard to almost every aspect of life in the Farrow household, Soon-Yi’s story, like those of her younger brother Moses and Allen himself, is strikingly different from what’s put forth by Mia and Dylan as well as their son and brother Ronan Farrow, the journalist who has written a series of high-profile #MeToo stories over the past year. I can’t pretend to know what actually occurred, of course, and neither can anyone other than Allen and Dylan. Even the judge who eventually denied Allen custody of Dylan opined that “we will probably never know what happened on August 4, 1992.” All of life is filled with competing narratives, and the burden of interpretation is ultimately on the listener and his or her subjectively arrived-at sense of the truth.

People will choose sides, based on previous loyalties and ideological standpoints, often ignoring evidence and even succumbing to flimsily substantiated conspiracy theories. (Needless to say, Merkin herself has faced multiple accusations of bias, both as a long-term acquaintance of Allen’s, and as a #MeToo sceptic). Still, a few salient points, often ignored, deserve to be made in Allen’s defence on both (separate, but in many minds, related) counts: that of the inappropriateness of his relationship with, and possible grooming of, his now wife (who was his then girlfriend’s adopted daughter); and that of sexually assaulting his own adopted daughter.

Allen is on record as stating that he had no serious qualms about his relationship with Soon-Yi. ‘I didn’t feel that just because she was Mia’s adopted daughter, there was any great moral dilemma. It was a fact, but not one with any great import. It wasn’t like she was my daughter,’ he told Time magazine in an August 1992 interview. ‘I am not Soon-Yi’s father or stepfather. I’ve never even lived with Mia. I never had any family dinners over there. I was not a father to her adopted kids in any sense of the word.’ Supporters will concur. Detractors will see in this attitude further evidence of the man’s deficient conscience, and questionable moral probity. It does seem that the romantic part of Allen’s relationship with Farrow was well over by the time Soon-Yi and he got together, at least according to the Woody and Soon-Yi side of things. Allen and Farrow were maintaining a loose union mostly for the sake of the two children they had adopted, and the one biological child they had had together. In December 1987 Farrow gave birth to her and Allen’s son, Satchel (now known as Ronan) Farrow. Farrow wanted to adopt another child in 1991, and Allen said he would not take ‘a lousy attitude toward it’ so long as she agreed to his adoption of Dylan and Moses, whom Farrow had already adopted by herself. In October of that year she adopted another Vietnamese child (who turned out to have disabilities Farrow could not cope with, and so was passed on to another adoptive family). Allen’s adoption of Dylan and Moses was finalised in December 1991, shortly before Farrow discovered that Allen and Soon-Yi were romantically and sexually involved, in January 1992.

Soon-Yi’s version of events, and justification for them, is more or less the same as Allen’s. In August 1992 she wrote, in a statement to Newsweek, that Allen had never been a father figure to her, and that they had become friendly long after his romance with Farrow had ended, adding:

I’m not a retarded little underage flower who was raped, molested and spoiled by some evil stepfather – not by a long shot. I’m a psychology major at college who fell for a man who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Mia. I admit it’s offbeat, but let’s not get hysterical.

This was repeated twenty-six years later, in that controversial 2018 Vulture interview with Merkin: ‘We didn’t think of him as a father. He didn’t even have clothing at our house, not even a toothbrush.’ She went on to say that she was ‘madly in love’ with Allen. ‘[I was] completely attracted to him, physically and sexually. I know he’d said that I’d meet someone in college, but I’d already decided,’ she told Vulture. ‘From the first kiss I was a goner and loved him.’ As Allen and Farrow had never married, and as Allen had never adopted Soon-Yi, their relationship was not illegal. Furthermore, at twenty-one, she was more than ‘of age’. Soon-Yi’s affirmations are, unsurprisingly, disparaged by the vilifiers, as the product of an impressionable young woman manipulated by her more worldly and high-profile partner, and who may even be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. This interpretation finds its equal and opposite expression on the part of Allen’s advocates in the contention that Dylan was coached by Farrow into making her accusations of molestation, as the vindictive vengefulness of a woman wronged.

However, in many ways, the propriety of Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi is a red herring, when it comes to characterising him as a sexual predator. Although it should not need to be pointed out, apparently it does: when it comes to passing judgement on Woody Allen’s large age gap marriage in particular, or large age gap relationships in general, and whether or not the senior party – man or woman – is de facto creepy, Allen’s status as an accused (but, more importantly, uncharged and unconvicted) child molester is simply irrelevant, if only because paedophilia (defined as a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children), hebephilia (a primary or exclusive sexual interest in eleven to fourteen-year-old pubescents) and ephebophilia (a primary sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages fifteen to nineteen) are very distinct, not necessarily overlapping, preferences, with the later not considered by mental health professionals to be pathological. Twenty-one-year-old women are not seven-year-old girls. In other words, it would be entirely possible that Allen could have groomed Soon-Yi as an adolescent but not molested Dylan; and, vice versa, he could possibly have molested Dylan while not ever have been grooming Soon-Yi. One act would not substantiate the other. In addition, it is just as likely that neither act took place as that both did.

Paedophilia itself is a compulsive behaviour: you do not suddenly start acting on paedophiliac impulses when you are fifty-seven-years old. Indeed, clinicians differentiate between paedophiles and child molesters, and ‘preferential’ and ‘situational’ child abuse, since not all of those with a sexual preference for prepubescents molest children, and not all child molesters are true paedophiles. There are motives for child sexual abuse that are unrelated to paedophilia, such as marital problems, the unavailability of an adult partner, or general anti-social tendencies – which does not, of course, mean that everyone who finds themselves in such situations is going to abuse children. Furthermore, paedophilia is a prenatal, genetic sexual orientation: people are born that way, rather like being born straight, gay, bi or trans. For this reason, there is no evidence that paedophilia can be cured. Such an endeavour would be a little like trying to ‘cure’ homosexuality through aversion therapy, one of the more shameful practices of the many to be found in the history of psychiatry. Instead, most therapies focus on treating paedophiles so that they refrain from acting on their desires. However, in the wider society, just as there was once no understanding, or at best condescension, for LGBTQ+ people or unmarried mothers (the phrase ‘single parent family’ had not even entered the lexicon), now there is none for paedophiles – only judgement and condemnation. Every generation needs a minority to hate on, even if it is demonstrably true that paedophiles do more harm to the vulnerable than LGBTQ+ or unwed Mums ever did. Remember: there was a time, not so long ago, when gay people were routinely considered to be a bunch of pederasts, and unmarried pregnant females were thought of as lascivious ‘fallen’ women, whose ‘innocence’ had been taken, or who had given it up too easily. Magdalen laundries were full of them.

Allen had no previous record of sexual activity with children (which does not, of course, mean that it did not happen – nor would it be of much consolation to Dylan, if her accusations against Allen are true). Various studies have indicated that non-paedophilic offenders do tend to do so at times of high stress, have a later onset of offending, and have fewer, often familial, victims; while paedophilic offenders frequently start offending at an early age, have a larger number of victims who are more often than not extrafamilial, and are more driven to offend. Such classifications and terminology may be irrelevant to victims, but while the possibility that Allen is a very late onset, single incidence child molester remains, it is unlikely that he is a paedophile. His numerous relationships with adult, so called ‘age appropriate’ women would also militate against this diagnosis.

For those unfamiliar with the bare facts, Allen was accused of one incident of molestation of a seven-year-old by the child’s adoptive mother, against the backdrop of the revelation of his legal relationship with another adoptive daughter of the seven-year-old’s adoptive mother, and the ensuing custody battle between him and the child’s mother for custody of the seven-year-old adopted daughter, and two other children, one adopted and one biological. He was investigated in two separate states, Connecticut and New York, and cleared in both. These investigations included both physical and psychological examinations of Dylan, and lie detector tests taken by Allen, which he passed. The Connecticut State’s Attorney did not press charges. During the investigation the Connecticut State Police referred Dylan to the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale–New Haven Hospital, which concluded that Allen had not sexually abused Dylan, and that the allegation was probably coached or influenced by Mia Farrow. After a fourteen month long inquiry, the New York Department of Social Services found ‘no credible evidence’ to support the allegation. Furthermore, Farrow’s legal representatives offered Allen the opportunity to have the abuse allegation remain private, in exchange for a huge payout to Farrow in compensation and child maintenance, which he refused. This hardly points to his having any sense of guilt, or an overriding desire to preserve his reputation.

But then come the speculative caveats: the state attorney in Connecticut found ‘probable cause’ to prosecute, but decided against doing so because it would further traumatise Dylan, and because there was ‘reasonable doubt’ that a conviction was a certain outcome, as it had been impossible to reach the conclusion that the abuse had occurred. One of the social workers in the New York investigation was fired and replaced because he was in favour of charging Allen. I find this latter claim, with its implication that Allen was too powerful a figure in the U.S. film industry to face the full rigors of the law, what with his having many sympathetic friends, and having brought millions in revenue into New York City, vaguely ridiculous: if Harvey Weinstein, a much more powerful presence in the U.S. film industry, can be charged and convicted, then Woody Allen certainly can. If it was so easy for rich and powerful men to act with impunity and evade the justice system, then why are Weinstein and Cosby serving prison sentences, and why was Jeffrey Epstein in prison on remand (when he committed suicide), while Woody Allen is not? As regards Allen’s rejection of Farrow’s lawyers’ attempt at mediation, which involved financial payments in exchange for making the charge go away, his antagonists might argue that this was only because Allen did not want to be lumbered with paying out such a large sum of money to Farrow in what he considered to be an extortionate deal. Again, your explanations will tend to be determined by which side you have already taken.

The opposition between Allen supporters who claim that Farrow coached and cajoled Dylan, and the Farrow supporters who claim that Allen groomed and manipulated Soon-Yi, sadly extends into the Farrow family itself. Moses Farrow, who was fourteen at the time of the accusations, and is today a forty-six-year-old psychotherapist, staunchly supports Woody and Soon-Yi. In a long blog post from May 2018 titled ‘A Son Speaks Out’, he makes detailed claims about how Mia tyrannised him into upholding her version of events, how Mia coached Dylan during the videotaped interview she did with her, and that initially taking Mia’s side before coming out against her when he was an adult (and therefore no longer financially dependent on her) was ‘the biggest regret of my life.’ On the other hand, Ronan (formerly Satchel) Farrow, aged four at the time and today a thirty-seven-year-old investigative journalist, staunchly supports Mia and Dylan. He continues to campaign against Allen, both in mainstream media outlets and on social media. On one side, Soon-Yi and Moses paint a picture of Mia Farrow as mercurial, violent and manipulative, given to outbursts of rage and cruel punishments, and the instigator of Dylan’s allegations against Woody, as revenge for his affair with Soon-Yi. On the other side, Dylan and Ronan defend their mother against attacks while continuing to assert that Woody molested Dylan.

What those who take sides in the Farrow family feud generally do not take into account is that even if Mia was an abusive, controlling, bad mother, it is still conceivable that Woody Allen molested Dylan Farrow. One possibility does not negate the other. It just adds to the sadness. Equally, just because Woody Allen began an affair and since married a woman thirty-five years younger than him, who was his then partner’s adopted daughter, it does not automatically make him a paedophile, a molester, or even a groomer. A further strand in this tangled web is the possibility that Soon-Yi Previn could have been exacting a subtle form of revenge on her adoptive mother Mia Farrow, consciously or unconsciously, for what she perceives was an abusive childhood, by ‘stealing’ her boyfriend. What is clear, however, is that there is a marked difference between the accounts and outcomes of Farrow’s biological and/or Caucasian children, and those of her adopted and/or Asian ones, and the sides they have subsequently taken. So maybe she did play favourites, as many parents do, with undertones of racism.

‘What’s your favourite Woody Allen movie?’ So begins Dylan Farrow’s open letter to the New York Times of 01/02/2014, in which she reiterated her accusation of molestation by Allen. There has emerged a line of argument which attempts to find evidence of his grooming of Soon-Yi and –  bizarrely – his molestation of Dylan, in Allen’s inappropriate interest in teenage girls as displayed in his film work. While reference is made to a few snippets scattered throughout the oeuvre, such as when Rob, the friend of Allen’s Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977), in recounting an escapade in Los Angeles, declares, ‘Twins, Max! Sixteen years old. Can you imagine the mathematical possibilities?’, the chief culprit is the entirety of Allen’s 1979 movie, Manhattan, with its central storyline of a relationship between forty-two-year-old television comedy writer Isaac Davis (played by Allen) and seventeen-year-old high school student Tracy (played by Mariel Hemingway).

Revisiting Manhattan forty-five years later, what is striking now is not only how all the other adult characters in the film are totally accepting of the couple in their social circle (save for a solitary  throwaway quip by Ike’s other love interest, Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton): ‘somewhere Nabokov is smiling’), regarding it as at worst an eccentric but charming peccadillo, but also how garlanded with praise from both audiences and critics, as well as awards, the film was at the time of its release. Even as late as October 2013, Guardian readers were voting it the best film directed by Woody Allen. Clearly, Manhattan’s portrayal of a middle-aged man dating a teenager drew little derision back then, with the sole dissenting voice on record being that of Pauline Kael, who wrote in her New York Times review: ‘What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?’ What viewers and so-called critics frequently do not realise about Annie Hall is that, despite the fact that it is narrated by the Woody stand-in Alvy, it is actually about a developing female artist (whose name gives the film its title) who outgrows an immature male partner. Similarly, with Manhattan, it is Tracy who imparts important life lessons to Ike, such as the closing advice ‘you have to have a little faith in people’. Manhattan only began to attract more negative analysis in the late 2010s, as Allen’s reputation again came into question after the rise of the #MeToo movement, and Dylan’s reiterated allegations. Societal attitudes have changed, but only relatively recently.

As even those who find Allen suspect or downright creepy will have to admit, Manhattan came out at a particular point in history (which was pretty much most of history up to and surpassing that particular point) where the kind of relationship portrayed in the film seemed unobjectionable to many adults (male and female). Take, for example, the character of Randal P. McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962): feigning mental illness, McMurphy is transferred from a prison work farm to a psychiatric facility because he thinks it will be an easier way to serve out his six month sentence. His crimes? ‘Drunkenness, Assault and Battery, Disturbing the Peace, repeated gambling, and one arrest for…’ Statutory Rape. He was never convicted, as the fifteen-year-old girl chose not to testify, possibly due to intimidation. However, McMurphy claims that the girl, ‘Said she was seventeen, Doc, and she was plenty willin’.’, and that her insatiable sexual appetite made him take ‘to sewing my pants shut.’ He continues his own defence by arguing that he was forced to leave town after the trial because, ‘that little hustler would of actually burnt me to a frazzle by the time she reached legal sixteen.’ The subsequent filmisation by Miloš Forman, released in 1975, is even more openly condoning of McMurphy’s sexual history (and readers who are easily triggered should consider themselves warned that perhaps it would be in their best interests to skip over this excerpt from McMurphy’s interview with the good Dr. Spivey):

She was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and she told me she was eighteen, she was very willing, I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of you, I don’t think it’s crazy at all and I don’t think you do either. No man alive could resist that, and that’s why I got into jail to begin with. And now they’re telling me I’m crazy over here because I don’t sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don’t make a bit of sense to me. If that’s what being crazy is, then I’m senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that’s it.

Presumably, Kesey as author, followed thirteen years later by scriptwriters Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, thought that this crime was an acceptable one for a protagonist – whose status as a Christ-like figure is subtly alluded to throughout the narrative – to commit, and still remain a ‘good guy’, or even a secular redemptive saviour of sorts, however flawed. The reading and film audiences were in accord – if they thought about it at all – given the massive contemporary popularity of the book and film. Interestingly, Ryan Gilbey’s reassessment in the New Statesman on the occasion of the film’s re-release in 2017 appeared under the headline: ‘Watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest again, I feel sorry for Nurse Ratched’, the character previously seen as the story’s arch villainess.

But Tracy in Manhattan was not underage ‘jailbait’, to use the colloquial term for the temptation of sexual relations with minors. The age of consent in New York state was seventeen in 1979, and remains so today. (As of April 2021, of the fifty U.S. states, thirty have an age of consent of sixteen, nine at seventeen, and in eleven states the age is eighteen.) Thus, there is nothing illegal about Ike and Tracy’s relationship, as she is deemed capable of giving consent to sex with anyone else over the age of seventeen (save for cases of incest), with no so-called ‘Romeo and Juliet’ rules governing the age of her partner(s). Whether or not that represents informed consent is a matter for the legislature. (As we know from the political sphere, consent can be manufactured.) I would suggest that if the majority of a given society is of the opinion that a sexual relationship between a forty-two-year old and seventeen-year-old, or the portrayal thereof, is inappropriate, reprehensible, or criminal, then it is the current law which now needs to be changed, not the filmmaker or his work, retrospectively. After all, you cannot be indicted for a crime now that was not a crime then – in fiction or in reality. Well, maybe in fiction.

Was Vladimir Nabokov a predatory, manipulative man because he wrote a novel about a predatory, manipulative man? Hardly, although Martin Amis, who averred ‘I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius’ (in ‘The Problem with Nabokov’, The Guardian, 14/11/2009), cannot help but have queasy reservations about what he perceives as the ‘only significant embarrassment’ in the literary reputation of one of his writerly heroes, opining (in ‘Divine Levity’, Times Literary Supplement, 23/12/2011): ‘Of the nineteen fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly concern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls . . . To be as clear as one can be: the unignorable infestation of nymphets in Nabokov is not a matter of morality; it is a matter of aesthetics. There are just too many of them.’ What if Nabokov had been accused of sexual impropriety (as could happen to anyone, for a variety of reasons, especially those burdened with teaching fickle, entitled students in the humanities departments of universities, in order to earn a living), would the facts that he had written Lolita and that paedophilia features in five of his other novels have been held in evidence against him? Was Nabokov a creep because he wrote about creeps – at length? Doubtless, there are millennials who would like to see Lolita banned, just as there were Moral Majority types who wanted it censored when it was published in 1955 (by the Olympia Press in Paris, for fear of backlash in the Anglophone world). Senior publisher Dan Franklin has gone on record stating that he would not publish Lolita today, for fear ‘a committee of 30-year-olds’ would resign in protest because of #MeToo and social media.

Granted, it is disingenuous to conflate opposition to abuse and harassment with unreconstructed Judeo-Christian prudishness about sex. But it still amounts to arguing that there are facets of human behaviour that are out of bounds for nuanced exploration by artists and writers. We have exchanged the rationale for the puritanism of one era for that of another – however well-intentioned both of them were and are. Lewis Carroll obsessed about a prepubescent girl in Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Father/Daughter incest is a major theme in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. From Gravity’s Rainbow to Bleeding Edge, via Mason & Dixon and Against The Day, incest and paedophilia run like a fault line through the work of Thomas Pynchon. In these days of sensitivity readers, should we ban them all? Should they come with a health warming? If we accept that paedophilia and incest and sexual abuse of children in general are things in the real world, and that they are immoral, where does that put the morality of writing about the topics or choosing not to, or passing laws to outlaw or censor such material? Does choosing not to publish facilitate covering them up? Does choosing to do so serve in tacitly promoting them? Such writing is deeply discomfiting, as it was probably intended to be. You would probably not be well-adjusted if you did not find it so. One thinks of Judge John Munro Woolsey, who concluded in the New York trial of Joyce’s Ulysses for obscenity in 1933 that, ‘Whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.’ But did the good judge not suspect that the novel’s power as an emetic was in some ways dependent on its being aphrodisiac? Does it not all depend on point-of-view and direction of sympathies, both within and without the texts? And, if so, who is to decide what the point-of-view, and direction of sympathies, are? Who will judge the judges? But if you are really looking for a book to censor because of depictions of rape and incest, then why not start with the Bible?

There is a large age gap relationship in Sophia Coppola’s film Lost In Translation (2003), which remains unconsummated. The precise disparity itself is left unspecified, but Scarlett Johansson was seventeen when she played the role of Charlotte, a recent Yale philosophy graduate in her early twenties, and Bill Murray was fifty-two when he took on the character of Bob Harris, a faded actor in his early fifties. That the mutual attraction is romantic in nature is made clear by the significant show of disappointment exhibited by Charlotte when Bob has a fling with a more age appropriate woman (equally adulterous, but that transgression is not the focus of our moral inquiry here). In her rather vanilla defence of her storyline, in an interview given as part of the twentieth anniversary of the film’s release, Coppola stated:

Part of the story is about how you can have romantic connections that aren’t sexual or physical. You can have crushes on people where it isn’t that kind of thing. Part of the idea was that you can have connections where you can’t be together for various reasons because you’re at different points in life.

But what if it had turned sexual? Would Bob have suddenly metamorphosised into a predatory creep? Certainly, certain sections of the commentariat would have it so. They even express misgivings about the relationship portrayed as it stands. It is unlikely that what is widely regarded as a Gen X cinema classic would garner such a warm reception were it released today, given the heightened awareness of gendered power imbalances in the movie business, and elsewhere. The film assuredly benefitted greatly from being released before online discourse consumed pop culture, as it would easily have fallen foul of debates about the ethics of age gap relationships if it came out in the age of X (formerly Twitter). Furthermore, what if it had been made by a man? What if it had been made by Woody Allen?

I notice that I myself have now fallen into the trap of failing to distinguish between legal and illegal sexual activity. But perhaps that is because there is a large cohort of people who are of the opinion that associations which are currently legal ought to be illegal. And if that were to happen, such currently legal relationships would become much less common in fictional representations, as it would become much less of a burning issue, although not in the realms of fantasy fiction. The queasiness of taboo which applied to Lolita in its day would now apply to Manhattan – as, indeed, it already does, but with much greater force, as now both scenarios would be equally illicit. And what would be the fate of future attempts at such representations?

The fact is, just as Annie Ernaux was attracted to a man thirty years her junior, older men have always been attracted to women much younger than themselves, for the very reasons Ernaux says motivated her in her attraction to a much younger man. This is entirely understandable, whether you are a man or a woman: after all, youth is beautiful and full of promise; age is ragged and full of compromise. Was Ernaux grooming and being manipulative? Probably not, as it was her lover who first wrote to her, although she may have taken advantage of his fandom to have her way with him. But that was just ‘reclaiming female desire’. Nor has she been the only one engaged in this pursuit. When it comes to writers, a nefarious bunch to be sure, consider this: Iris Mudoch had a (legal) affair with a student when she was forty-four and he was twenty-four; Angela Carter had a (legal) affair with a nineteen-year-old man when she was thirty-one; and Germaine Greer published a book entitled The Boy (2003) – a study of the youthful male face and form from antiquity to the present day – in which she wrote that the ideally attractive boy must be ‘old enough to be capable of sexual response but not yet old enough to shave. This window of opportunity is not only narrow, it is mostly illegal.’ The erotic reawakening of middle-aged and older women is the main theme of several recently published novels: in Susan Minot’s Don’t Be A Stranger (2024), Ivy Cooper is in her early fifties, while her love interest Ansel is twenty years younger; in Miranda July’s All Fours (2024), the nameless heroine is forty-five-years-old, and constantly fantasises about sex with whomever; and Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir (2022) (a sly nod to Nabokov), features an unnamed fifty-eight-year-old academic, whose husband has been accused of historic sexual misconduct with seven ‘of age’ students, lusting after a forty-year-old colleague. (Parenthetically, Anne Enright’s excellent early short story ‘Felix’ riffs, both stylistically and thematically, on a female Humbert Humbert, a forty-seven-year-old suburban housewife who has an affair with her teenage daughter’s boyfriend.)

In the cinema world, the mother-of-all-cougars is the Simon and Garfunkel serenaded Mrs. Robinson, the older woman who seduces and has an affair with Benjamin Braddock in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967). A then thirty-five-year-old Anne Bancroft was playing a woman whose age, although unspecified, was at least ten years older than that, somewhere in her forties, which is a sharp reminder of Hollywood’s standards when it comes to roles for leading actresses (or ‘female actors’). As the twenty-one-year-old Benjamin, twenty-nine-year-old Dustin Hoffman was in reality only six year younger than Bancroft. (Interestingly, the film also contains a false rape accusation, made by Mrs. Robinson against Ben, in order to thwart his relationship with her daughter, Elaine (Katherine Ross)). The older-woman-younger-boy trope later appears in Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal (2006), itself adapted from the 2003 novel by Zoë Heller. The scandal in question concerns forty-one-year-old art teacher and mother of two Sheba Hart, who has an affair with one of her underage secondary school students, fifteen-year-old Steven Connolly. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Liquorice Pizza (2021) is a contemporary film depicting a twenty-five-year-old woman, photographer’s assistant Alana Kane, dating a fifteen-year-old boy, actor Gary Valentine. Todd Haynes’ May December (2023) features Gracie Atherton-Yoo and her husband Joe Yoo, who started a relationship in the 1990s, when she was a thirty-six-year-old mother of two and he was twelve. Gracie has spent time in jail for statuary rape, where she gave birth to Joe’s baby. When she was freed on parole they got married, had two more children, and are still together. The scenario is loosely based on the real life story of Seattle teacher and mother of four Mary Kay Letourneau who, aged thirty-four in 1996, seduced her twelve-year-old student, Vili Fualaau. Like Gracie, Letourneau spent several years in prison, and married a then of age Fualaau upon her release in 2005, and had two children with him. In Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (2024), CEO Romy (Nicole Kidman), a married mother of two daughters, embarks on a powerplay affair with her intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). While how old they are is not specifically detailed in dialogue, the official screenplay indicates that their respective ages are forty-nine and twenty-five, a twenty-four year disparity. Furthermore, Kidman is fifty-seven while Dickinson is twenty-eight, making the leads’ real life age gap one of twenty-nine years. (As it happens, Kidman is no stranger to taking on such roles, as she portrayed similar older women involved with younger men in A Family Affair (2024), The Paperboy (2012) and To Die For (1995).) Reijn has promoted her film thus:

If we see a movie where the male actor is the same age as the female actor, we find that odd. Which is insane. It should completely be normalized that the age gaps switch and that women have different relationships. We’re not trapped in a box anymore. We internalize the male gaze, we internalize patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It’s really hard.

In real life, Madonna is sixty-five, her boyfriend is twenty-seven. Cher is seventy-seven, her boyfriend is thirty-five. Brigitte Macron is seventy-one, her husband Emmanuel Macron is forty-seven. Some of these relationships are legal, some are not, while some inhabit a grey area, depending on where and when they occur. But the middle-aged ladies are evidently horny for young male flesh, at least in these zeitgeisty cultural representations. The message is clear: having a toy boy is cool, whereas having a younger woman, it would seem, is not – or not anymore. What men have always known, and women are catching on to, to echo Ernaux, is that connubial domesticity is often a burdensome bore from which respite is required. Thus, for men, the acquiring of a mistress, or the discreet visits to the brothel, to supplement the mundane or meagre mollifications of the marriage bed. So, either women are just catching up and this is only equality in action, or else no older person, man or woman, should be allowed to cultivate such intergenerational romantic or sexual relationships in the first place. After all, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander – or is it the other way around?

CLICK HERE to read PART II of Desmond Traynor’s ‘Woody and Annie (and Others)’.

Feature Image: G1AWGP Cannes, France. 12th May, 2016. Woody Allen, Soon Yi Previn Director And Wife Cafe Society, Premiere. 69 Th Cannes Film Festival Cannes, France 12 May 2016 Diw88737 Credit: Allstar Picture Library/Alamy Live News