A divorce in the public square

The first casualty of divorce is innocence. After more than eleven years spent forming a singular but stable couple, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow are divorcing (1). From now on, instead of sending each other messages by waving towels from their respective houses on either side of Central Park, they exchange bitter accusations. As we know, a conflictual divorce can damage health, and above all the health of the children caught up in it.

When there are women who see their dreams smashed to pieces and men who feel their manhood under threat, both can come to hate with far more fervour than they ever managed to love.

Cinematically speaking, Allen has given us countless reflections in the form of a gag or of spoken commentary. He has argued many times that family life gets in the way of an artist’s career and that only after fifty does one begin to realise where one stands. He has accustomed us to psychological dramas dealing with the insecurities, the fears and the infidelities of human beings. His defeated antihero has become a symbol of moral victory. But now, with his real-life divorce, it is he who places himself at the centre of the plot. More than that: he seems to have done exactly what he accused himself of in Manhattan (1979) — manufacturing superfluous neurotic problems in order to avoid facing the universal ones, the ones that have no solution.

One might have presumed that after a certain age, and once he had become a biological father for the first time, he would stop being an egocentric comic hero.

At the very moment when circumstances asked it of him most, he did not give up self-pity, nor did he tune in to the noise of the world.

He transferred his affections from Farrow, his companion of more than ten years, to her adopted daughter, Soon Yi, twenty-one. He denies that this involves any form of incest, since he acknowledges himself as the father of only three of the eleven children who live with Mia. She, for her part, accuses him of sexual abuse against Dylan, seven, which led him to argue that those he considers his children are living with a mother hostile to his image and to his person. To counter this, he has sought custody of Satchel (his four-year-old biological son) as well as of Dylan and Moses (adopted). Behind a curtain of mutual accusations, Allen, fifty-six, and Mia, forty-seven, have aired the couple’s dirty linen in broad daylight. Mia’s lawyers are setting out to demonstrate “the state of mental frailty of a man who wishes to obtain custody of his children and the right to visit them”. It seems to be confirmed that the sentimental ties between them had been no more than cordial these past four years. The love relationship had begun to disappear, strikingly, after Satchel’s birth.

They never married and never lived together continuously (he considers himself claustrophobic).

Meanwhile, the distributor Tri Star Pictures has decided to bring forward the release date of the last of the thirteen films they are working on together: Husbands and Wives. A promotional scene from this brand-new film shows the two of them energetically debating whether she needs psychiatric help.

Beyond the scandal between a well-known actress and a renowned comedian, playwright, clarinettist, actor, screenwriter and film-maker, what we have here is a serious, badly resolved family conflict, with a parallel romance and a lawsuit thrown in.

The rules of the game and the weight of what one does

To assess correctly what is happening to these characters who make their private lives public, it is not only important to know the rules at play in the society they live in and their particular values: one must also weigh up properly the consequences of their acts.

When Allen states that he never represented a parental figure for Soon Yi, excusing himself on the grounds that he never knew her very well, he puts forward a reckless picture — including when he declares that this relationship never stopped being a footnote in the young woman’s life, a flirtation with her mother’s partner, until the moment it became intimate and exciting.

It should be added that the girl was under ten when Allen began to take a continuous part in the family group. The sad irony of the situation is that his own children are now the brothers and sisters of his partner, and that his ex-partner becomes his possible mother-in-law. But he apparently does not consider problems of kinship very important. Neither he nor Mia asks about the psychological tearing to which they have exposed — and continue to expose — the minors involved in this situation. The adolescents and the children find themselves placed in the position of privileged spectators, witnesses and judges of the brawl between their supposed adult figures. They have been allowed, and even helped, to take sides.

What is worth asking is whether this is a crisis of people of a certain age, a crisis of the marital format or the expression of a crisis of social values. Or all three in unison. The situation of competition between the mother and the daughter is perfectly visible here. There is also a perverse intergenerational coalition of two people (the father and the adopted daughter) against a third (the mother, supposedly authoritarian).

It also seems that the latter is displaying the vengeful wishes of a wounded wife and a deceived mother. Mia acknowledges having spent close to a dozen years with a man ready to destroy her and to corrupt her own daughter by pushing her into betraying her; it is hard, she says, to imagine a crueller way of losing a daughter and a lover at the same time.

As almost always in a divorce, the warring clans that “defend” each of the parties have appeared: in Mia’s corner, her mother, her ex-husband and her sisters; in Woody’s, relatives, friends and an ex-wife.

Doing battle over custody is a symptom of a co-parental breakdown. Arguments of mutual disqualification expose the children still further to having to choose which part of themselves they will have to amputate.

The questions that remain open

The questions are many and the outcome uncertain.

Has this supposedly great mother of so many children (thirteen very shortly) been an adequate container for them? Was the qualitative care owed to them neglected? Soon Yi has said that it was.

• Is that also why we see yet another stepfather appear, maintaining an erotic bond with one of his partner’s daughters?
• Are we seeing here, once again, the accusation of child sexual abuse used as a means of blocking visitation rights or custody?

In a 1989 film, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen presents a rich and famous doctor, engaged in an extramarital relationship, who confides in one of his patients, a blind rabbi. Coming out of that conversation, he concludes that God is a luxury he cannot afford. And so, faced with a morally neutral universe and with a blind God, it becomes possible for Oedipus to turn into a joke.

Children are not characters in a fiction

It is true that a stepfather’s interpersonal boundaries are ambiguous. But as soon as he places himself, and is placed, as a responsible adult hierarchically differentiated from the mother as well as from the father, confusion seems inevitable.

It is indisputable that, in post-divorce families enlarged and recomposed by the formation of a new couple, all the adults are influential figures, to a greater or lesser degree, affectively as well as normatively, in relation to all the children in their care.

What is incestuous here, moreover, cannot be discussed solely on the basis of whether or not Allen was an involved stepfather, but on the basis of whether Soon Yi had sufficient maturity and protection not to involve herself, or be involved, in the couple life of her significant adults.

Children belong, in principle, to the world of reality; protecting them properly requires a family form, before divorce as after it, that guarantees this.

One may refuse commitments as a couple, but it is no longer a matter of choice when it involves beings who need responsible adults, whether they are biological or adopted children.

This is not one more story staging two film characters; it is not even another little tale of a mature man in love with a very young girl, like those that appear in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) or in Manhattan (1979).

It is a real fact, bearing on the consequences suffered by unprotected children. To look after them properly, it is not enough to collect them or to select them. It is not possible to live realities as if they were fiction (where everything is possible). Adults are not the only ones to suffer the effects of their mistaken conduct. When a couple is formed with dependent children (their own or other people’s), its commitment holds not only between its two members, but also towards those who depend on them. If the needs of the latter are not put first, the picture of family disorganisation and its consequences can appear as we see it here (and not only in poor families). The most notable thing is not the public display of private life, nor the repetition of an interactional pattern consisting in forming a couple with much older men (Mia with Sinatra and then with Previn, Soon Yi with Allen), but other, psychologically more toxic situations.

The good arts and the bad

Even if Allen feels no moral dilemma and denies having represented a parental figure, he is responsible, together with Farrow, for the oedipal and loyalty conflict in which they have involved children and young people.

When the well-being of children is at stake, neutrality and what is called value-free information become ethically questionable.

Not all family structures are equal when it comes to accommodating children’s needs as well as possible.

To abuse committed against minors there corresponds only one answer: real responsibility on the part of parents, lawyers, therapists, judges and so on.

The pathetic conclusion of Crimes and Misdemeanors can be avoided. The film argues that human happiness is not written into the plan of the universe, and that we make heartbreaking decisions by which we define ourselves, failing which we could not go on living.

The good arts have connected us emotionally to vital aspects of the world. The bad (arts) produce the opposite effect: they threaten our freedom as sentient beings, for they tend to disconnect us from the human.

Classically, tragedy too has been a form of therapy, a catharsis for the audience. The hero’s flaws enrage the gods, and that is why he is confronted with a destiny of downfall. Tragedy is a moral tale about the price of ambition and of the betrayal of loyalties.