I applaud your persistence and fortitude in watching this farrago, but have
two questions, neither of which is dealt with in the show (I refuse to call it
a "documentary"), I assume. This first is that I thought it had been
established that the infamous "twenty minutes" were actually no more than five.
Is that not the case? Second, is the concept of Allen choosing that day, when
he was under extremely close watch, to be the perfect time to make his alleged
move dealt with, or is it ignored, as with any other exculpatory evidence?
--Dave Sikula
On Sunday, March 7, 2021, 9:54:52 PM PST, PGage <[email protected]> wrote:
Okay, so Episode 3 is the strongest of the three hours shown so far, (though
still in my view not very good) after Episode 2 last week, which was by far the
weakest (and again I so agree with the point made by others that the bloat in
the documentary is atrocious).
The heart of any argument that the evidence is clear that Allen molested Dylan
has to be in explaining why the official investigations into the allegations
did not find them convincing. Episode 3 engages these issues, and raised some
valid questions (e.g, why did the Yale Child Sexual Abuse Clinic destroy their
notes? Why did they interview a 7 year old child so frequently?). Unfortunately
the documentary is again not transparent or complete in its discussion of these
issues. They have a couple of experts say that notes are never destroyed in a
forensic assessment like this, but neglect to report that in the early 1990s it
was not just common professional practice, but state law, to destroy notes
after a determination was made that alleged abuse had not occurred. I agree
that frequent interviews of young children are poor practice, but the doc does
not say (and, having read the summary of the Yale Clinic’s findings, I still do
not know) how long each of these interviews were, or how many of them covered
the same ground. The documentary also fails to point out that the video Mia
made of her daughter prior to taking her for formal evaluation was itself
composed of many sessions, with the camera turned off and on repeatedly.
I have been thinking that if the Doc had any chance to justify itself, it would
be in presenting new evidence to show malfeasance in the CT and NY
investigations, but there is nothing new here, mostly warmed over (often
directly quoted) allegations from long time Allen critics like Maureen Orth. I
also thought there might be reports that Mia was alleging multiple incidents of
abuse, but so far the focus is on those missing 20 minutes allegedly in the
attic. It’s not impossible that Woody Allen is a single incident child
molestor, but that is hardly the typical pattern. Dylan was examined by
physicians and even her mother acknowledges no physical evidence of sexual
abuse was ever found; this does not rule out many kinds of sexual abuse, but
again there is no evidence here that abuse occurred. The long section of Ep 3
that is Allen critics annotating the custody trial and outcome is of no bearing
on the central issues. As the doc point out, it is common for fathers accused
of abuse to sue for custody (sometimes vindictive punishment by psychopaths,
other times genuine and heartsick attempts to rescue children from toxic
envionrments), but in my experience even conventional fathers most often do not
win, and putting child abuse allegations to the side, Woody Allen is hardly a
conventional father.
Maybe episode 4 will bring something new (one would think they would try to end
with a bombshell - and they hint at some explosive explanation why the CT DA
did not file charges at the end of Ep 3) but after 3 bloated hours there is
nothing substantively added to what was previously known about this case.
On Wed, 3 Mar 2021 at 7:05 AM PGage <[email protected]> wrote:
She stole my line...except, that is pretty much the only thing to say about
this case, at least if you want to bend over backwards to be fair to Mia and
Dylan.
Freeman appears to have seen all four episodes in the last couple of weeks,
after saying when episode 1 aired that she hadn’t seen it at all. If she’s
right then the series is worse than I assumed, in that it never addresses most
of the contrary evidence.
The filmmakers have been saying in the media that their documentary does not
need to be balanced, because Woody’s version has for 25 years been dominant,
and they are bringing balance by supplying Maia and Dylan’s version. I’m not
convinced there was ever a time that this was true - Allen has said relatively
little over the years, and a search of Twitter will show that most people
expressing an opinion about this assume “Woody Allen married his step daughter
and molested his own child; WHY ISN'T HE IN JAIL?”
I have been reluctant to bring this next point up, because it is ugly and has
the effect of undermining Mia Farrow’s version even though as far as I know she
has no connection to it. As I have been reading Twitter comments on this story
I have been surprised at a steady stream of both latent and manifest
antisemitism animating much of the anti Woody posts. (Raising this of course
risks enacting a central trope from Annie Hall, but then I always preferred
that to Manhattan).
I’m not saying that anyone who believe the worst about Allen must be suspected
of being an antisemite, but it does seem that, far more than with Harvey
Weinstein (or Matt Lauer, though perhaps that is more understandable), Allen’s
Jewishness is referenced in some way by a surprisingly large fraction of his
detractors. I suppose that is due in large part to Allen making his Jewishness
a big part of some of his films, and that for many Americans he has been their
most influential exposure to Judaism. The ugly sense I get though is that for
some, the molestation charges, even with relatively low levels of validity,
free them up to basically say: “I always found that weird little Jew to be
creepy.”
My point in bringing that up is to suggest the explanation lies in the
ambiguity surrounding the charges, which allows observers a less constrained
field to project their own biases into the story.
On Wed, 3 Mar 2021 at 5:12 AM Adam Bowie <[email protected]> wrote:
A key paragraph perhaps considering what @Pgage has been saying:
"Ziering and Dick don’t know what happened between Dylan and her father.
Neither do I and neither, perhaps, does anyone at this point, as repeated
retellings take the place of real memory. Braver and better film-makers would
drill down into how historical truth can change over time, and how two people
can look at one image and see very different things."
On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 1:09 PM Adam Bowie <[email protected]> wrote:
The previously mentioned Hadley Freeman from The Guardian has a decent piece
just published on what the documentary makers appear to have to left out:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/mar/03/allen-v-farrow-woody-allen-mia-farrow-documentary-is-pure-pr-why-else-would-it-omit-so-much
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