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Allen was born into Bronx serfdom, the son of Martin and Nettie Konigsberg, still happily married after 62 years. His psychograph is to be found mainly in the emotional autobiography he has transformed into comedy routines and then movie art. As Ice-T can attest, it is treacherous to mistake the singer for the song. And it is presumptuous for the public to believe it "knows" Woody $ Allen. And yet Allen's work presents itself as so nakedly, ostentatiously about himself that it seems fair to subject it to a critic's equivalent of the psychoanalysis he has undergone for decades. Many of his monologues and films have dealt not just with middle-aged men falling in love with teenagers or infantile women but with the titanic, tragicomic struggle of intellect and lust.
It is a struggle, his films say, of man with himself. Women are the objects, the prizes, the threat. Perhaps this is why he has often portrayed them as voracious or vapid, why a hint of misogyny courses through his oeuvre. Allen's first wife brought a $1 million suit charging Allen with "holding her up to scorn and ridicule" after finding herself, as French critic Robert Benayoun writes in a sympathetic biography of Allen, "the source of numerous stories ((that)) turned her private life into a national joke." Keaton and Farrow, his two longtime romantic companions and frequent co-stars, often played neurotic child-women, stuttering to finish a sentence, in wry awe of the man in their grasp: Woody Allen. He may have idolized them too, but with the indulgent devotion of a grownup to his precocious daughter.
These days, as notorious gentlemen from Rob Lowe to Clarence Thomas have proved, every scandal is a career move. Indiscretions that movie stars once paid to suppress they now discuss on Oprah and Arsenio; those modern-day analysts' couches have become celebrities' thrones. Allen the filmmaker can use this publicity; his recent movies have been flops. (An industry axiom: everybody knows Woody Allen, but nobody goes to his movies.) It is even likely that the brouhaha will boost Husbands and Wives at the box office, at least until people decide whether they like it or not. For Farrow the actress, the spin is not so profitable. For years she has taken the exclusive role of Allen's Galatea. Now that's over. She has been replaced in his next project, Manhattan Murder Mystery, by another actress: Diane Keaton.
The human heart is a dark forest. Most of us are strangers to one another and to ourselves. At this late date in human devolution, we should be surprised by no atrocity, no anarchic spasm of the emotions, no paternal love turned to lust, no feelings of rejection twisted into an urge to revenge. We should be surprised only by our surprise. The innocent prurience of our tabloid souls suggests that a deep part of us craves for people to be good and for beginnings, at least, to be happy.