Apropos of Nothing and the Ghost of Woody Allen

I am a child of the 1980s. That’s the decade that shaped and molded me. That means that I grew up in a time when the single most beloved and respected person on television was Bill Cosby, the most beloved and respected pop star was Michael Jackson and the world of American cinema did not boast a titan more revered than four time Academy Award winner Woody Allen. 

Like seemingly everyone in the Reagan decade, I respected the hell out of Cosby, even if I was never much of a fan of The Cosby Show. I adored Michael Jackson’s music and considered him the single greatest entertainer of his time, which, in hindsight, was unfair to Prince. 

But I fucking loved Woody Allen. I looked up to him. I saw myself in him. As a neurotic Jewish boy in love with movies and ideas and comedy, his work so spoke to me, my anxieties and my aspirations on a profound level. 

I wanted to be Woody Allen when I grew up. I developed my sense of humor in no small part by imitating Woody, from the inflections and rhythms in my voice when I cracked wise to the deep strain of self-deprecation running through everything that I did. 

My whole family loved Woody. Some of my fondest childhood memories involve going to the movie theater with my family to see his latest masterpiece, whether that was Zelig or Purple Rose of Cairo or Hannah and Her Sisters.

I devoured dog-eared collections of Allen’s short stories like Side Effects, Without Feathers and Getting Even. I read and re-read them, hoping that some of the master’s genius might rub off on me. 

If you had told the ten year old me that someday Woody Allen would finally write an autobiography that you literally could not pay me enough money to read and write about, for a variety of exceedingly valid  moral, psychological and professional reasons, I would not have believed you. 

Yet the idea of reading and writing about Allen’s recent memoir, Apropos of Nothing, which was quietly released by Arcade after its original publisher, Grand Central Publishing dropped it after extensive protests, never even occurred to me even though a meaty evisceration of the book and its author would be both exceedingly on brand for me and a sure-fire attention grabber and page-view champion for my website. 

Writing about entertainment saner souls would never deliberately subject themselves to is kind of my whole deal but when it came to the toxic memoir of a comic mind I once loved with my whole heart and soul and now find abhorrent I was happy to leave the job of reading Apropos of Nothing and wrestling with its implications to Mark Harris, who did an absolutely magnificent job dissecting Allen’s epic exercise in self-incrimination for Vulture. 

The Allen of the public imagination is a deep thinker forever engaged in the vexing but rewarding process of trying to understand himself and the world around him, often from the vantage point of a psychiatrist’s couch. Yet the Allen that emerges in Harris’ review seems uniquely, even perversely uninterested in self-reflection. 

A cartoon intellectual synonymous with psychiatric analysis in his movies seems incapable and uninterested in analyzing himself, his motives or the world around him in real life.

During the many decades when Allen was worshipped as a genius and a God, his famous aloofness was seen as a great artist and thinker’s indifference to the tacky rewards of our material world, whether in the form of great wealth, tremendous fame or awards. 

From the perspective of 2020, however, it’s starting to look more like the moral and spiritual apathy of a man who does not believe in anything, a self-absorbed nihilist who is cold and hollow at his core, with a highly polished Catskills routine where his soul and his moral compass should be. 

The Woody Allen character feels less like an expression of Allen’s true self than a mask he uses to hide who he really is. As a kid I thought I knew who Allen was through his movies and his books and his stand-up comedy but it turns out that nobody really knows Allen, least of all himself. The Allen Harris destroys with words is unknowable in part because there’s nothing ultimately to know.

Before reading Harris’ article I read a brief excerpt from the book and experienced the same kind of powerfully conflicted emotional double response I do when a Kanye West song goes through my head.

In both instances, the initial spark of enjoyment and appreciation, that warm sense of familiarity that comes with being reminded of something that once meant everything to you, is immediately followed by a shiver of anger and revulsion. With Kanye, any enjoyment I get from remembering one of his early songs is immediately snuffed out by the knowledge that Kanye West is now a high-profile Donald Trump supporter. With Allen, that miniature blast of childhood nostalgia is similarly met with the cold truth that Allen is dead to me at this point in his life and his career, that there is nothing he could say or do that would cause me to see him as anything but a monster. 

The older I get, the less capable I am of separating the artist from the art. This is particularly true when, in the case of people like Woody Allen and Louis CK and Kanye West, all of whom I borderline worshipped before they showed the world who they were truly are, their art is a ferociously personal. 

I identified with Allen on an intensely personal level. So it follows that my disillusionment would be equally intense and personal, to the point where I could only process Allen’s self-serving autobiography vicariously, through a review rather than the text itself. 

The Allen I grew up worshipping is dead, which makes Apropos of Nothing feels like the memoirs of a ghost whose ominous specter haunts a body of work I once revered as peerless in the history of American film but now seems hopelessly tainted. 

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