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Neurotic parents, probing children

2020-06-06T03:58:24.079Z


Both Ronan Farrow and his father, film director Woody Allen, accused of sexually abusing his daughter, play at modeling their masks in their respective books


Woody Allen and Ronan Farrow have a rough confrontation from the darkness of a dark and raucous past. Allen was accused of sexually abusing his daughter, Ronan's own sister. Some facts, as Aeschylus, Sophocles or Faulkner well knew, forever mark the lives of people and their descendants. The opportunity to access representations of the soul of Allen and Farrow (the director's autobiography Apropos of Nothing and the book on investigation of sexual abuse Catch and Kill ) constitutes an irresistible invitation. To gossip in the personal abysses of a catastrophic event? Well yes, too. But above all to observe how one and the other play to model their masks.

By the way, nothing starts out as a confusing initial confession, alliteration worth. Woody openly declares himself neurotic and impervious to culture. He came to a world "in which I will never feel comfortable, which I will never understand, never approve or forgive." Too much Schopenhauer for a native allergic to reading. "He was a lazy man who didn't find anything funny opening a book." Even for his adult development he discards intellectual endeavors. The inks come heavily loaded. “I was healthy, dear, very athletic, I was always chosen first to form the teams, I played ball, ran, and yet I managed to end up being restless, fearful, always with broken nerves, with composure hanging on a thread, misanthrope, claustrophobic, isolated, bitter ”. A neurotic without cause. "My mother claimed that I was a kind, sweet and happy child until the age of five, and that later I became a vinegar, unpleasant, spiteful and bad boy."

Not so much. Woody, a macarronic Freudian, probably does well in self-analysis. The alleged misanthropy abruptly collides with the imperial deployment of collaborators, friends and acquaintances. The text sometimes seems like a succession of thanks at the Oscars ceremony. Everyone is good: Mickey Rose, Marshall Brickman, the actors and actresses he works with, the Doumanian couple, Louise Lasser, Tony Roberts, Diane Keaton ... All but two villains, Mia Farrow and Judge Wilk. And even in Farrow's case, by psychiatric inheritance.

But readers don't risk getting bored. The autobiography runs through Groucho Marx territory. The jovial, light concoction, with caustic soda flashes, includes moderate family satire and spectacular gaffes. Allen masters the recourse to grotesque comparison and phrases that go in one direction and change abruptly at the end. Deficiencies? Any. An analysis of his films or a reasoned explanation of his aesthetic interests are missing. Allen hastily gets rid of the problem. “My filming habits are lazy and undisciplined; I have the technique of a failed film student who has been expelled (...). I like writing more than shooting, because shooting is hard and physical work. ” Nothing in the text clarifies for us why the quantum leap is made from Boris Grushenko's The Last Night to Annie Hall and, later, to the stories of gray bergmaniano. Allen only recognizes himself as a compulsive writer who believes in the superiority of the script.

The autobiography has an expiatory background that is explained by the intense interest in explaining the unfortunate episode of the accusation of sexual abuse perpetrated on Dylan, the daughter of Allen and Farrow. The author builds his defense on three lanes. The first is an insistent declaration of adoration for the girl. It is, so to speak, the tenderness argument whose objective would be to discard the disposition to sexual violence from the outset. The second vector is the description of Mia Farrow's personality as a vengeful witch, truly unconcerned with the welfare of her children (biological or adoptive), skilled in manipulating the behavior of her offspring, even training them to lie, surrounded in addition to ominous signs deranged relatives. The third is the highly argued refusal. If Allen's version is to be believed, it is not because he went out of his way to deny the allegations, but because social services and the police ruled out traces of violence in the girl after carefully examining her.

Predators (Catch and Kill), the book tells the investigation of Ronan Farrow on sexual abuse in Hollywood and the media, is a moral exercise of the first order that deserves public appreciation of all those who believe in equality and in democratic values. Farrow (aligned with his mother in front of Woody Allen in the rape accusations) denounced in The New Yorker the sustained practices of sexual abuse practiced by Harvey Weinstein; a terrifying scab of feudal arrogance embedded in a democratic society tied up by too many knots of power. Weinstein appears as a vociferous ogre, a troll convinced that he has the right to intimidate his subordinates, impose disgusting sexual acts on them, and consider himself entitled to demand silence. It is unknown whether Weinstein's moral deformity or the environment of infectious tolerance created around the Miramax boss (or other rapists, such as NBC's Matt Lauer) is more chilling.

More perplexity even produces the guilty and equally criminal consent of the corporate managers, who did not hesitate to drown out the judicial complaints by paying large compensation and compensation to the victims. Is this the profitability defended by the capitalist mechanisms of large corporations?

But below its value as a complaint, Predators produces an uncomfortable feeling. The complaint is chilling, but the formal packaging does not convince. We are in King territory, due to expository incontinence and Farrow's ornate prose. As is often the case with the Maine horror master, the book is overloaded with excess deadlift. There are expendable pages and repeated exposures. Ronan's obsessive presence in each sentence, in each paragraph, ends up exhibiting the author's narcissism.

At the end of the book, Ronan talks with his sister Dylan. "You didn't have your report," he says. And so Satchel Ronan Farrow reveals the painful hidden engine that has pushed him against Weinstein and allowed us to attend the fetid organized show of sexual assault. The blame attributed to the parents weighs like a deathstone on the children.

SEARCH ONLINE 'ABOUT NOTHING'

Author: Woody Allen.

Translation: Eduardo Hojman.

Editorial. Alliance, 2020.

Format: softcover (440 pages, 19.50 euros), audiobook (23.99) and e-book (11.49).

Find it in your bookstore

SEARCH ONLINE 'PREDATORS'

Author: Ronan Farrow.

Translation: María Enguix Tercero.

Publisher: Roca, 2020.

Format: hardcover (484 pages, € 22.90) and e-book (€ 9.99).

Find it in your bookstore

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2020-06-06

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