So, nobody not last named Allen is happier than I am that this HBO series is over. This week I have had the unique experience of both being accused of being in favor of the sexual abuse of children (by online interlocutors, not on this list) and spending a couple of hours reporting one of my patients for sexually abusing a child.
For me the most notable part of E4 was Mia Farrow saying to the interviewer off camera that she never brought a BF home after Woody, because she did not trust herself to bring home a man who ~ “would not fall for one of my kids” (quote approximate). To my ears this telegraphs that, both in the immediate aftermath and today, what Mia Farrow is most fixed on is that Woody cheated on her with her older daughter, since I don’t think any mother who really believed her BF had sexually molested her 7 yo daughter would refer to that as him having “fallen for her”. E4 opens by picking up what the show thought was a big cliffhanger from E3, which is the Press Conference by the Connecticut States Attorney announcing he was not going to trial. He does signal that he leaned towards believing the allegations, but he also says that after getting on the floor to interview Dylan (in the approved manner of such things) he and the most aggressive prosecutors on his staff concluded that they could not put the little girl on the stand. He frames that as not wanting to traumatize Dylan again, but based on my experience, that is mostly bullshit; not that I doubt that he didn’t want to harm the child, but that this was not likely the determining factor for not going forward. Every case of child sexual abuse requires having a child testify about the abuse. Without for a moment trivializing the harm entailed in the kind of behaviors alleged by The Farrows against Allen, I have been part of lots of cases where the abuse alleged was even more horrific and over a longer period of time, and while I have seen families decide they did not want to put their children through a trial, I have never seen a prosecutor decide that. Keep in mind that the courts do not allow children to be cross examined in the same brutal ways we have come to expect key adult witnesses to be grilled on TV shows. The courtroom is often cleared of all but essentials, and defense attorneys speak in calm, measured and usually affirming tones when questioning the child. More likely, in my experience, when a prosecutor decides, based on their interview with the child, not to proceed, it means that, however much they might be inclined to believe the child, they do not believe she would make a credible or compelling enough witness to get a conviction. E4 also addresses the most obvious criticism of the show, that it is one sided. This is identical to the defense they have been giving in the media all month, which interestingly, is the exact same response that defenders of Fox News give to the same accusation. First they throw up a kind of weak denial that they are one sided, then they say that since the other side has been over presented for so long, the only way to bring balance to the universe is to be very one sided in the opposite direction. Aside from being a self deligitimizing argument for any news project, this response serves to illuminate the very narrow cultural space occupied by the makers of the program. I think the suggestion that the majority of Americans have been passionate Woody Allen fans and have been on his side since the allegations were made is demonstrably untrue. Most Americans have never cared about Woody Allen, and of those who do at least as many have disliked him, even before the allegations. What is probably true is that the Hollywood elites have loved Woody Allen, and this seems to be what angers Mia Farrow so. It doesn’t take much to suspect that second only to the identity of the current Mrs Allen, Mia is angry that young actresses like Scarlett Johansson have taken her place not just in his heart but his films. (Note Woody has now been married to the now 50 year old Soon Yi for almost 25 years, more than twice as long as his non marital relationship to Mia Farrow, and longer than any other romantic relationship of his life). So, maybe if this was a long piece in The New Yorker it would be bringing balance to the force, but not the nationwide HBO audience. I will inhibit my impulse to go on at length about the sound bites from talking head mental health experts and briefly flashed text crawls, except to say that the exaggerations and imbalance embodied in them decreases my confidence in the Program as a whole. Again, if this show were called “Mia’s Story” or “Dylan’s Story” I would be much less critical of it (though no more convinced of its claim to have finally provided the smoking gun evidence for their allegations). Also, again, I leave this show as I came to it, agnostic as to whether Allen is guilty of this crime. It’s possible. But I would say that I am less inclined to believe this now than I was a month ago, only because I have always assumed that if we heard the full story from Mia and Dylan’s side, it would include allegations of more specific incidents of abuse, either of Dylan, or of one of Mia’s other young children, or of other children he had access to. While not unheard of, it is rare that a man in his 50s starts molesting children for the first time, and even more rare that he only does so one time, in a situation that was providing him with anything but a secure target of opportunity. Having his 7 year old daughter suck his thumb, putting his head in her lap, having sex with a 21 year old he knew from her childhood, however typical, or atypical are unrelated to pedophilia. There is nothing in the 4 long hours of this show that is new evidence to support the claim. What was new was seeing the home film Mia made of her young daughter talking about the allegations, but we knew that film existed, and for me anyway seeing them if anything made the allegations less credible. The show ends with what to me is it’s most infuriating aspect: framing the debate as “do you believe Dylan?” This is most emphatically not the question. I doubt anyone thinks Dylan Farrow, now or 27 years ago, is lying. I was in grad school a little less than a decade before these allegations came out, during the McMartin Preschool Trial. The mantra among psychologists at the time was “Believe the children!”, and for a while I repeated that too. But as the trial played out it became clear that while the children were not lying, important parts of the story they were telling were not true. Throughout the 1980s and 90s we went through emotionally and sometimes physically violent storms of hysterical claims of sexual abuse of children which simply were not true. Even as we became more cautious about these claims, we always were clear that sexual abuse of children was all too real, and way too frequent. But we also learned something the makers of this show clearly have not, which is that as much harm can be done in perpetuating untrue claims as in ignoring true claims. -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. 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