Woody Allen and the Transgression of Familial Boundaries

Back in the 1980's, I was a big fan of Woody Allen. As an undergraduate philosophy major, "Love and Death" was one of my favorite movies.

Then, in the early '90's, Allen's long-term relationship with Mia Farrow fell apart amidst a scandal featuring a sexual relationship between Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow's adopted daughter (21 at the time). There were also darker accusations about sexual abuse of his and Mia's 7-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow (who now goes by the name "Malone").

I really didn't know what to make of those accusations at the time. But my taste for Woody Allen's movies withered. I stopped watching them. Even setting aside the child abuse allegation, the fact that Allen had a sexual relationship with the daughter of his long-term lover, who was also the older-sister-by-adoption of Allen's own children, was enough to evoke in me a kind of moral nausea. This spoiled his work for me. I couldn't enjoy it anymore.


Now, for the first time, Dylan Farrow has written her own public account of what she remembers--an open letter in which she offers a raw and harrowing description of being groomed and molested by Woody Allen. Allen has broken his long silence on the subject to call the account "untrue and disgraceful."

Maybe so. Or maybe it's both true and courageous. Obviously I don't know which is correct--but unlike some commentators, I don't think Allen's relationship with Soon-Yi Previn and the allegation of child molestation can be treated as wholly unrelated issues.

That's how Robert Weide treats them, in a Daily Beast essay that came out days before Farrow's open letter. Weide, who produced the two-part PBS documentary on Allen, comes to Allen's defense in response to renewed controversy, and among other things questions Dylan Farrow's reliability if not her sincerity. Of course, he does so without the benefit of having read her letter, since that didn't appear until a few days later. He is, instead, responding to a fall Vanity Fair interview in which she stood by the molestation charge.

That charge, according to Weide, is dubious at best. He doesn't question her honesty. Instead, he thinks she might believe the molestation story simply by virtue of having "grown up in a household where this scenario has been accepted as indisputable fact." The power of suggestion, and all of that.

The details of Dylan Farrow's account, as laid out in her open letter, call into question for me this sincere-but-misguided hypothesis. But that's not what I want to focus on here. The fact is that Weide treats the scandal surrounding Woody's undisputed sexual relationship with Soon-Yi as having no bearing on the question of whether we should believe what Dylan Farrow is saying.

Let me be clear: I agree that the relationship with Soon-Yi is not a case of child molestation (unless there are facts I don't now). And I agree that it would be unsound and unfair to offer a simple inference from "Woody Allen started a sexual relationship with the daughter of his spouse when that daughter was 19" to "Woody Allen sexually molested his own daughter when she was 7."

What I want to argue is that both of these things are morally problematic transgressions of familial boundaries (although the latter is far, far worse). And this fact creates a connection.

We clearly can't say that someone who has a history of shoplifting is thereby capable of breaking into homes and stripping them of valuables. But we can say that someone who has done the former has displayed a willingness to ignore an important moral precept about private property and theft--and that a willingness to do that is a necessary condition (not sufficient) for being the kind of person who could do the latter.

That's the sort of connection that I take to exist between Woody Allen's admitted relationship with his now-wife Soon-Yi and the allegations that Dylan Farrow has made. By itself, the connection is hardly sufficient to draw any conclusions. But I can't help but think it strengthens the case for treating that harrowing open letter as what it appears to be based on its content: a courageous confession of awful truths.

But this line of thinking depends on my claim that Woody Allen's relationship with the adopted daughter of his long-time intimate partner amounts to a moral transgression in the same broad class as parental sexual abuse. Am I right that these acts are related in something like the way that shoplifting a sweater from J.C. Penney's is related to breaking into someone's home to make off with treasured heirlooms? The latter, in both cases, embodies evils that the former does not. It more clearly violates someone, a victim who is tangibly and lastingly harmed.

In both cases, the former isn't as bad. But "not as bad" is consistent with being a moral wrong that has things in common with more egregious wrongs.

For me, the problem can be described as follows: At least some role-defined familial boundaries aren't just a matter of quaint tradition but exist for a reason. They exist in order to enable certain kinds of relationships to become excellent instances of relationships of that kind, promoting the goods that such relationships are distinctively suited to serve while preventing harms that being in such relationships makes one vulnerable to. Sometimes one kind of relationship clashes with another, so that actualizing the potential of one requires that you not pursue the other. It's concerns like these that create worries about romantic relationships between, say, a professor and student.

And there are indirect conflicts as well. It is harder to maintain a healthy parent-child relationship if the parent is pursuing a romantic relationship with the child's sibling. And I'm not talking about biological siblings. I'm talking about roles here. If you and Mary think of each other as siblings, and your father (who isn't Mary's father) starts romantically courting Mary, that's going to affect your father-child relationship in potentially troubling ways--especially if you're a young child unschooled in making subtle distinctions. "Dad is sleeping with my sister" blurs familial lines and complicates how one thinks about Dad--even if the sister is a sister by adoption twelve years your senior and Dad isn't your sister's father.

More obviously, if you and Martha are cultivating a life partnership and then Martha starts a romantic relationship with your son, that's going to be more than just an act of infidelity. Something about the very structure of intimate partnership makes it more than fitting that you adopt a paternalistic stance towards your partner's children, even if they're not your own. Not that you have to parent them yourself, but  a life partnership is about supporting one another in one's major life projects--and parenting is a major life project. Solidarity with your spouse means being in their corner when they pursue such projects. This entails a kind of empathetic participation in their parenting commitments that is threatened if you pursue a relationship with their child incompatible with a parental role.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Woody Allen demonstrated a disregard for the sorts of constraints within which various kinds of valuable relationships have the best chance of flourishing.

Sexual molestation of one's own child is the most extreme instance of this sort of violation. It combines the evil of child molestation with the fundamental betrayal of the parent-child relationship. While someone willing to play fast-and-loose with familial boundaries isn't thereby going to molest their own child, a practical disdain for familial boundaries is a necessary prerequisite for molesting your own child.

Woody Allen openly admits to things which display such disdain. That, by itself, doesn't make him a child molester. But it isn't irrelevant to weighing the accusation.