This shit’s complicated
When the public battle between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow first began, I knew immediately that it would get ugly. But even I didn’t expect the bitterness, anger, rage, and bile that would spew forth. 1
From all sides.
I’m well too aware of the several issues and historical facts that do arise from this matter: That incest and sexual abuse within and outside families are all too common, that survivor children, particularly of the wealthy and/or well-known are likely to be shut up and even shut away if they dare speak out, that survivors of sexual assault of any kind are less likely to be believed than their perpetrators, and that the torment of shame and stigma can haunt anyone who speaks out for their rest of their lives. The cops are the least likely to extend help, and will readily blame the victim. Years ago, when my laptop was stolen from my Chicago porch, the two cops who came to take the report gently chided me for having left it out there. And then, one of them used an analogy that brought my vulnerability even more to the fore: “Look at this way: If you walked around naked in front of your windows, would you blame anyone for coming in and doing things to you?”
I don’t equate a robbery with sexual assault; it shocked me that the analogy was, first, so easily made out of context, and that the cop so loosely made the equation between being robbed and being sexually assaulted. This is the sort of thing that cops will freely say, so we need have no doubt in their ability to treat actual victims of sexual assault with judgement, contempt, and disdain.
But I’m also acutely aware, as someone who has spent a lot of time researching sex offender registries and sex abuse cases, that false accusations are horribly common. Queers in particular have been targeted by sex offender registries, but today SORs affect vast swaths of people across sex, gender, and sexuality categories.
It’s not just in the arena of sex offender cases: When it comes to sexual assault, there’s no dearth of false accusations and no dearth of actual assaults, and cases are often tinged by race and class. When it comes to celebrities and divorce, matters can become even more complicated given that large amounts of money and fame are often at stake.
At the risk of seeming reductive, this shit’s complicated. It’s not a cop-out to say that I’m in the position today of saying that I neither believe nor disbelieve either Allen or Farrow, even though, yes, to be frank, my inclination is to believe that Dylan Farrow’s supposed testimony is a clouded and cloudy one. As sympathetic as I want to be about her accusations, there were two main factors that prevented and still prevent me from taking her seriously: Mia Farrow and Nicholas Kristof. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a later piece, but for now let me simply state that this has been a turgid mess, and the combination of a publicity-seeking celebrity and a man infamous for having been at the heart of so many overblown, hysterical narratives about sex trafficking combine to make me queasy about the whole business.
Let me simply state, for now, that when the story first began to gather momentum, I found myself faced with comments on all sides that horrified me, and I sought a network of people who have a history and an understanding of such media spectacles, as well as the complexities surrounding all the issues of gender, sexuality, and sex crimes. In particular, I wanted people with the kind of historical memory about such events that would help me remember that there are larger contexts behind this matter.
Those interlocutors were gracious enough to engage in long conversations between all of us over email, the result of which looks like a year’s worth of seminars on Sex, Celebrity, and the Regulatory Neoliberal State. So I want to begin by thanking all of them for sustaining me through an intellectually and emotionally difficult period, and for providing me with so many rich thoughts and analysis. The best of what will follow, in this series, is due to them, and I take the blame for anything that fails. James D’Entremont, Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, Roger Lancaster, and Matt Simonette: Thank you for all the conversations, your continued support, and your individual and combined brilliance.
By now, some might be wondering: Why continue to write about the Allen-Farrow debacle? In the intervening period, Ronan Farrow has gained an MSNBC show, Mia Farrow continues to tweet, Cate Blanchett received an Oscar for her work in Blue Jasmine, and Woody Allen recently received accolades for his performance in Fading Gigolo. By the logic of the internet and the publishing world, this is an “old” topic, settled, and should be left alone.
But my own writing roots are in academia, where it’s not uncommon to return to an event from very long ago and to examine or reexamine an event or set of events in light of contemporary questions. The Allen-Farrow matter has flared up on and off for several years now, and both the main players are symbolic of very specific cultural shifts, not the least of which is a move from the relative insularity and authority of an entity we used to call Stardom to that more diffuse set of vibrations we refer to as Celebrity.
In the last few decades, the conversation around rape and sexual assault and related conversations around incest and children and child sexuality have also shifted dramatically. We have gone from a time when jokes about sexual assault were accepted to a time when, well, in truth, those are still tolerated. What has changed, though, is a heightened awareness of what some term (problematically, in my view) “rape culture,” and questions around matters like consent and sexual coercion.
What is so fascinating about the Allen-Farrow case is that it spans those decades, in part because of the age of the main characters whose own careers speak to the changes in Hollywood and in part because even the differing responses to the many accusations and allegations made on all sides speak to the shift in attitudes to celebrity, sex, and sexuality.
When the most recent kerfuffle came about, I thought at first that I would compose an opinion piece on one aspect of it all. At this point, I can’t even remember what that was, but I know that I quickly realised that there was too much to this entire situation to be compressed into one piece. And then I began noticing not only the familiar tropes that were beginning to emerge (guilt, betrayal, innocence) but those that were being deliberately ignored.
For instance, there was what was, to me, the simple matter of transnational adoptions and Mia Farrow’s frenetic zeal to satisfy a maternal urge. To me, there were unexplored matters of race and power clearly evident in all this, and given the Soon-Yi scandal earlier, these were inextricably linked to sex, but no one was even questioning how those dynamics in a curiously and large blended family might have played out in the string of renewed accusations.
And that was another matter that intrigued me: When the now well-known Maureen Orth Vanity Fair piece was published in November 2013, Dylan Farrow’s accusation about Allen went largely unnoticed because the bigger scandal was the revelation that Ronan Farrow might actually be Frank Sinatra’s son and not Allen’s, as Allen himself had been led to believe. It was only when Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter that the Times would only publish on Kristof’s blog that the accusation was renewed and, strangely, and without anyone actually noticing, rehashed the exact same questions that had been raised years before when she had been a child. In 1992, both the Soon-Yi case and the accusations about Dylan Farrow’s abuse at the hands of Woody Allen had come together, again, also in the hands of Maureen Orth.
That led me to re-examine the facts laid out in Orth’s two articles, and consider them next to other pieces of testimony, including those found in Mia Farrow’s memoir, What Falls Away.
What I found as a result will, I think surprise many people, but I want to pause here and emphasise, once again, that my aim is not to engage in a forensic reading of the case but an analytic one. I have, I believe, in the process of unpeeling the many layers around this matter, discovered some hitherto unknown facts, but my larger interest is in a cultural excavation of what the Allen-Farrow case speaks to in the realm of contested questions about a range of issues, from child sexuality to incest, from transnational adoption to celebrity parenthood, from “rape culture” to trigger warnings, and much more.
In the process, I began to return to other matters I’ve long been interested in, like the construction of the victim, especially in relation to women and sexual abuse and the implication of all that in the neoliberal state. This led me to the work of Kristin Bumiller, who has produced work like In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence. The controversy also unfolded in the midst of public conversations about the nature of feminism itself, and I turned to Liza Featherstone, whose wrote about the women of Walmart, in Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Worker’s Rights at Wal-Mart. I began once again to ponder an issue I’ve thought about a lot for many years, of transnational adoptions, and I turned to Joy Messinger, who’s been writing about this in Gazillion Voices, and to recent work on adoptions, like Sarah Cooper’s Everybody Else: Adoption and the Politics of Domestic Diversity.
What follows, on May 1, 2014, is “Adopting Difference: Race, Sex, and the Archaeology of Power in the Farrow-Allen Case,” about the relatively unexamined issue of transnational adoptions in the story. This is the first in a series on the Allen-Farrow case, and also the first piece in my subscription plan; the complexity of the issues demanded that I tease out specific issues in different pieces.
This does not, of course, mean that my entire subscription plan will be focused on the Allen-Farrow case. As this makes clear, I will be writing and discussing a wide range of issues.
The phenomenon of Celebrity, that descendant of Stardom, demands a critical and nuanced look at how it operates within the intersection of the public and the private, an intersection that is at this point sometimes muddied from view and sometimes not present at all, in an age where social media and the entertainment industry play a role in turning potentially everyone into a celebrity for a day or at least five notorious tweets. In the furore around the Dylan Farrow case, lines have been drawn such that one is either a believer or a disbeliever of her allegations, and much of the discussion (if not in fact all of it) has ignored the larger context of celebrity in which this story has been forged and laid bare for discussion. It’s not that Dylan Farrow is not to be believed because her father’s celebrity means she has an ulterior motive, as some have suggested. But it’s also not that she should be believed simply because Allen is a wealthy and powerful man and he must therefore have done what we assume the wealthy and powerful get away with doing.
All of this may well be true just as much as none of it may be true. I want to dwell on the role of celebrity in this case in order to complicate the matter of guilt and innocence, which has so far played out on simple and simplistic vectors, for the most part. The advantage of writing for a focused audience like you is that I can take the time to fully explore and tease out the multiple facets of an event or constellation of events, in a way that will ultimately take us further along in understanding their complexity. For this reason, I’m moving backwards in this long-term study, leaving the matter of guilt/innocence till the very end (and I make no promise of leaning either way by then). My hope is that by the time we reach the end of the series, we will have more fully engaged with the many issues raised by this case and been persuaded to do more than what the conventional pundits would have us do by simply taking sides.
1 For those unacquainted with the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow case, this piece provides a useful timeline.
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