Are Woody Allen's Films Really That Sexist?

The other day, I ran across an opinion piece on The Huffington Post about Woody Allen’s latest film, Café Society. The headline declares a destination: “How Woody Allen Still Gets Away With Writing Sexist Movies.” And the subhead plots a course: “Café Society is set in the ’30s to match the director’s retrograde views on women and love.”

This take on Woody Allen is nothing new, so at first I gave it little attention. But then I watched Magic in the Moonlight (2014) and saw in the two main characters an example of the views in question. Emma Stone plays Sophie, a poor American who claims to have clairvoyance. At first glance, she conforms to the pretty, young and dumb archetype. Colin Firth plays a rich Brit named Stanley, a famed debunker of charlatans. He’s older and believes he’s wiser, and at one point vows to take Sophie under his wing. Central to the film’s themes is the dichotomy between reason and magic, and here too the characters conform to stereotypes. Sophie is emotional and full of wonder at life, while Stanley sees everything in the stark light of reason.

 

Thus, Magic in the Moonlight would seem to support criticisms that Allen’s work is sexist, because, among other things, it employs outdated gender stereotypes. And if Magic in the Moonlight is sexist, then much of Allen’s work is sexist, because these themes, even analogues of these very characters, run throughout his work.

However, the kind of criticism that casually declares Allen’s work sexist is usually the kind that begins with a number of assumptions--about gender, sexism and Allen himself--and simply applies them to the work in question without listening to what the work says. This approach rules out, before interpretation has even begun, the chance of the critic hearing anything but an affirmation of preexisting convictions, such as those under which feminism tends to labor.

Feminist critique is certainly necessary and interesting--and it has the potential to be enlightening when applied to Allen’s oeuvre--but it all seems cut by the same cookie cutter these days, especially online. We all know, upon seeing the headlines, what we’re going to read and could tick off the main points without even reading them. At this point, the same old lines of attack are boring and obfuscate more than they disclose. There’s more to any work of art than any ideology will allow.

You could also try looking at Allen’s work this way: The typical Allenesque neurotic male is always the fool in the drama. Male rationality is not elevated to a virtue but rather ridiculed--and not just by supposed female irrationality. The men themselves are always shown to be confused romantics and the women to be shrewder, smarter and more capable. Allen purposely subverts the very stereotypes he employs. On the surface, the characters are one way, but just underneath they are another way, and this isn’t hard to see.

In Magic in the Moonlight, Stanley sneers at others’ fanciful notions and he mocks Sophie for being uneducated, but his overbearing rationality leaves him cold and empty, unable to see anything in a starry sky but a vast, menacing universe. His fear that his orderly world will fall apart blinds him to Sophie’s love for him and his love for her, leaving him a clown who is victim to his emotions. The voice of wisdom eventually comes through conversations with acquaintances, most notably Sophie and his aunt, who function like psychoanalysts by providing the “talking cure” that leads to self-realization.

 

Allen’s films do often speak an older language when it comes to the tug-of-war between the sexes, but that language was--and in the works of great artists and the lives of many regular people remains--often more egalitarian and sophisticated than our current polemical narratives regarding gender will admit. We shouldn’t abandon forward-thinking narratives for “retrograde” ones, but we do stand to learn from throwing more than one narrative at a work to see to what degree they all stick.

And we might try no ideology at all.

The dictates of ideology will only get us so far, but probably not very far. This is exactly Sophie’s--and Allen’s--point in Magic in the Moonlight: Thinking outside the constraints we impose on ourselves is liberating.

 

 

Previous post on Woody Allen:

Myths About Woody Allen's Oeuvre