Late in 1992, Woody Allen admitted a sexual relationship with his wife Mia Farrow’s adopted Korean daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. The press loved it, reporting all of the vicious charges of molestation and condemning the famous director. Family values Republicans and feminists had found something to agree upon: Woody Allen was a lecherous, incestuous Jew. In his press conference, Woody Allen said that love did not follow rules, a fact we all should have known anyway; he hadn’t asked to fall in love with Soon-Yi Previn, but knew his feelings independent of logic.

What has happened since is a division of Allen’s work into two stages: Before Previn and After Previn. Former fans forsook their former genius, as if this young Korean pussy had tainted Allen’s mind, infecting his art, as if the same internal forces that led Allen to Preven hadn’t been present throughout his career. I have actually heard academics, people with Ph.D.s in film, claiming with straight faces that Allen’s work after 1992 found less audience because they were inferior works, not the product of his former genius. This is ridiculous. It smacks of elite rationalization for an underlying provincial morality.

First, Allen has indeed produced great and interesting works since 1992. If he has been hampered by anything, he has been hampered by his declining audience and the well-publicized financial constraints that they have placed on his productions. But, since 1992, Allen has produced at least two masterpieces: Bullets over Broadway (1994) and Deconstructing Harry (1997), two very different brilliant looks at the nature of art and artists. Films like the musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996) have had utterly fantastic, mind-blowing moments and have been noble, though failed, exercises. Such a characterization applies to Allen’s pre-Previn work as well; I think Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), though it has oft been praised, is similarly an interesting failure. I’m not fond of Small Time Crooks (2000), which amounts to little, or Celebrity (1998), though it has some really great moments. Mighty Aphrodite (1995) also amounts to fairly little, though it's consistently near perfection (and quite memorable, from the Greek chorus, less far from the original that one might think, to the sex-related versions of mundane objects in her apartment and virtually all of her idiosyncrasies). I must confess that I myself, at least at present, adore Manhattan (1979) above all other Allen works -- virtually every shot moves me aesthetically and emotionally (though the beginning and ending are particularly stunning); its every glance, every slight stutter, every hesitation seems to communicate rich character. But to deny the great heights of Allen’s post-Previn career is to ignore art of lasting masterpiece quality.

Second, Woody Allen is a fucking artist -- literally. Romanticism cast the artist as social critic, as someone who explores the self, the irrational self, the dark recesses of the self into which society dares not venture, about which society dares not discuss. The artist, again in a post-Romantic world, owes no allegiance to church or state: his is the mythological third era of the world, Dante by way of Joachim of Fiore. And Allen’s work, from Love and Death (1975) to Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but was Afraid to Ask (1972), has repeatedly explored sexuality in our odd cultural moment.

In the end of Manhattan, his character, reciting what he knows about life into a tape recorder, realizes that he loves the under-age girl he had broken up with because it was not socially acceptable, because he believed it an impediment to her development; the beautiful simplicity of the fact that he loves her, illogical but incontrovertible, causes him to run through the Manhattan streets in the desperate hope of meeting her. When he does, it is a painful moment, her reflection on the glass door as he catches her about to leave for Europe. But what is crucial, and what many viewers despite their level of intelligence or education do not seem to get, is that he realizes that he loves her, society notwithstanding, and that this love is more important, more crucial, more alive than any faux concerns for her development, any false ideas, based on nothing resembling evidence, that such a relationship with a loving older man, a pillar of intelligence and education, is actually bad for such a girl. Does this teach us nothing? Does its beauty, in all its sensible insensibility, in all the simplicity of its rightness, despite its social unconventionality, tell us nothing?

Apparently.

Third, no one has said that Soon-Yi Previn did not consent. In fact, the two got married. So who’s the injured party? Upon whose rights were tread?

What people object to is the fact that, though he was not her biological father, he was a foster father, and their relationship thus reeks of incest and a father-figure taking advantage of his powerful position over a young girl. Fair enough. Like political figures, be they Bill Clinton or Gary Condit, we have generally accepted that an institutional power dynamic, while it does not abate content, upsets and complicates through context and circumstances the liberty in which that consent is given.

But love, as Woody Allen has said, does not wait until “proper” moments to express itself. We increasingly realize that we cannot legislate the propriety of love, be it interracial or homosexual. Yet we think it appropriate to legislate against “underage” sexuality -- as if teenagers and children aren’t sexual, as if they suddenly become intelligent to make decisions for themselves at some magical age, a fact that ignores that most 30-year-olds are little more prepared for sex, a complex act with grand psychological ramifications that most seek to avoid, than most teenagers. And we think it appropriate to legislate -- and condemn, as in Woody Allen’s case -- sex with an implicit power dynamic. Yet what’s to keep a boss and an underling, a professor and a student, from falling in love? Many of our parents met in such positions.

In fact, this may be no coincidence. Power is always a part of sex -- and sexual attraction. As Henry Kissenger puts it to Chairman Mao, who has asked how a fat man gets so many girls, in Oliver Stone’s brilliant Nixon (1995), “power, Mister Chairman, is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Hardly original but nonetheless quite true. Having power often means the ability to be unrestrained sexually, to try some of that nasty shit you want to do but rarely get a chance. It certainly did for Clinton, who not only got fellatio but analingus in the Oval Office, a fact a prudish Starr buried in the footnotes of his historic report, read by millions in virtually every major newspaper the nation over. And having another have power over one can be intensely erotic as well, as every woman’s body, if not conscious mind, knows during penetration. Explicit S&M is only an exaggeration -- and, at best, a revelation -- of what’s already there in penetration, in holding a lover’s hands down, in being on top, in the dirty talk, in that look across the office or across the bar. Power. Sex. Attraction.

A woman resisting a man’s advances and then giving in reenacts the ancient pattern of being chased and conquered, a rape in which she participates and which she enjoys. The feminists are right when they say that all sex is rape, when they point out that the power dynamic of rape is implicit in basic sexual rituals, in the conversation of seduction. But they, like society, reach the wrong conclusion, presuming rape -- such a dreaded word to the matriarchy -- to be unquestionably wrong. The act of rape is a revolutionary act, a protest against female sexual power, however indirect, against the cocktease implicit in those skirts, those looks, that advertisement and simultaneous resistance that is so much a part of female mating patterns -- and which the law protects. Yet we are unwilling to examine this, unable to examine the power implicit in sex because the very terms themselves are falsely loaded. And so it’s easier to condemn.

The incestuous nature of the Allen-Previn relationship also finds quick condemnation without thought. Yet every father -- every father -- passes his daughter’s room and thinks about it, knowing he could have her if he wanted, his mind contemplating that young pussy that must obey him and yield and be silent about it. This is not to say that such thoughts should be surrendered to; I am not advocating incest. This is only to say that such thoughts are certainly normative -- that someone who claims not to have such thoughts (and actually believes himself) is insane, clearly mentally unwell. Incest is an extension of the power dynamic, but it presupposes a kind of trust and fatherly desire to help. Incest is there in the older man who helps the young girl pay her apartment’s rent. It is there in the professor-student relationship, the father as teacher and the child as pupil who is receptive, female to his penetrating intellect and mind-spreading, challenging insight.

Incest is not present in the Allen-Previn relationship; the two are not biologically related. But with their relationship, unlike so many others in which the same dynamic is present, we cannot ignore the hints of incest, the presence of it as an erotic dynamic, and that upsets us. It upsets us so much that, as with power dynamics in general, we condemn instead of examining the bullshit, vanilla, bread-and-butter world of egalitarian sexuality, complete with condemns and polite respect, that we have so desperately attempted to construct in the U.S. and Britain. Sex isn’t this mutually fulfilling, nice and kind experience that we want it to be. We may have stripped it of marriage and wifely duty, but we’ve filled it with enough bullshit rhetoric of love and mutual respect -- not always erotic -- to make sex as repressive as anything the Victorians or 1950s’ American TV ever came up with.

Allen’s life, like his films, challenges that. And most of us, including apparent intellectuals, would rather condemn, rationalize, and exile a genius from our cultural polis than examine ourselves.

To the extent that we do not attend to our culture’s strange and contradictory attitudes toward art and sexuality, the spectre of Soon-Yi Previn haunts us all.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT THIS WEEK

As always, many small updates have occurred within The Continuity Pages.

You're getting this column five days early. Praise be to Darius.

Your assignment for this week is to visit my message board, read a bit, and courageously post one thing -- no matter how banal, no matter how short, for all the world to see.