Woody Allen is tone deaf, but contagion book is pitch perfect for the times

ANDREW DONALDSON

Me too, me too

Woody Allen’s controversial Apropos of Nothing: Autobiography (Arcade Publishing) is now out, and the reviews have not been kind. Writing in the Observer on this “protracted attempt at exculpation”, columnist Catherine Bennett tore into it and suggested that the director’s reputation may not survive the fallout from the book.

“Barely three weeks since [publishers] Hachette cancelled Woody Allen’s memoir, the book has been published elsewhere, and confirms that Stephen King, among many others, was right to worry about its suppression. The only person who stood to benefit from the silencing of Woody Allen was Woody Allen.” Ouch.

For Allen, Bennett argued, it appeared that the world had moved on from the free love and patriarchy of the Sixties, when men like him “could stroll on the Kings Road and pick up the most adorable birds in their miniskirts”. The director’s other “instructive synonyms” for women included “delectable bohemian little kumquats”, “little amuse-bouche”, “willowy lingerie models”, “cute little bluestockings”, “stacked miracles”, “dynamite blondes”.

If Allen had intended to depict himself as a “blameless creative and doting father, wronged by a scheming ex-partner, he seems only marginally less determined that readers marvel that he enjoyed what he describes as ‘romantic adventures’ with countless lovely, often strikingly younger women. Some are lucky enough to be distinguished by name — Mariel Hemingway, [Mia] Farrow, ‘the three Keaton sisters’. Others can be generically dealt with: ‘I have had brief dalliances with centrefolds.’”

The older women, or those that he dislikes, are accordingly frigid, mad, ugly or too keen on sex: one of his ex-wives, he writes, “never met a mattress she didn’t like and had a cottontail’s libido”.

Over at the New York Times, Dwight Garner revealed that as he progressed further into Apropos of Nothing he found that Allen’s “heavy breathing” reminded him “a lot of our current president”. Garner took the unusual step of indicating to his readers that volunteering to review the book, in the present moral climate, was an undertaking not without some consequence — especially as he would be revealing, at the outset, his antipathy towards Allen.  

“I told my wife and daughter my plan,” he writes, “and they stared at me as if I’d announced my intention to find the nearest functioning salad bar and lick the sneeze guard. This isn’t going to be a verdict piece on Allen’s morality. There have been a lot of verdict pieces. But so we’re on the same page, I’ll tell you where I stood before my editor e-mailed me a PDF of Apropos of Nothing.

“I believe Allen’s sexual relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his longtime partner Mia Farrow, which began when Previn was 21, was obviously the perverse act of a man whose brain salts are dangerously out of balance. He was nearly pushed out the door of American culture, only to sneak back in through a window. There’s queasy-making evidence of his sexual pursuit of other teenage girls. If these acts make you want to scrub his movies permanently from your Netflix queue, scrub.

“The accusation that in 1992 he molested his adopted daughter, the seven-year-old Dylan Farrow, is a charge of another magnitude. I believe that the less you’ve read about this case, the easier it is to render judgment on it.”

Allen’s problem, Garner believes, stems from the fact that, like many of his contemporaries, he is a 20th-century man in a 21st-century world. “His friends should have warned him that Apropos of Nothing is incredibly, unbelievably tone deaf on the subject of women. This tone deafness starts before the book has even properly begun. On the dedication page, he writes, ‘For Soon-Yi, the best. I had her eating out of my hand and then I noticed my arm was missing.’ I had to rub my eyes with my freshly sanitised fingers and read that second sentence again.”

Allen has now been married to Soon-Yi for more than 20 years. He writes that there’s an upside to being a pariah: no-one bothers him much these days. He’s easy with being reviled by so many and can live with it because he doesn’t read what people say about him. Near the end of what Garner describes as a “sometimes appealing, occasionally funny, sad and somewhat tawdry book”, Allen writes: “I’m 84; my life is almost half over. At my age, I’m playing with house money. Not believing in a hereafter, I really can’t see any practical difference if people remember me as a film director or a paedophile or at all. All that I ask is my ashes be scattered close to a pharmacy.”

Reading for today’s climate

Perhaps one of the most timely new books to add to the growing pile of “epidemic-themed” books is Adam Kucharski’s The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — and Why They Stop. The author is an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and his book breaks down the mathematical modelling of contagions.

If Kucharski’s book has a hero, then it is Ronald Ross, the British doctor who won the 1902 Nobel prize for his discovery that mosquitoes spread malaria. Ross had pioneered the use of biological and social processes in the modelling of epidemics. This was crucial. Where other researchers had looked backwards, detailing how epidemics had unfolded over time, Ross was able to look forwards, to predict the course of outbreaks, and suggest interventions. His ideas formed the basis of modern disease modelling, and is one of the strategies employed by governments in the fight against Covid-19.

But there are other characters in The Rules of Contagion who provide much food for thought, and it is interesting that many scientists who studied the transmissibility of “happenings” should take their work to wholly disparate fields.

Marine ecologist George Sugihara, for example, moved from studying fish populations to building predictive models for the Deutsche Bank. Epidemiologist Gary Slutkin moved from public health care in Africa to crime reduction in Chicago. Kucharski was the other way round: he moved from working at an investment bank to studying dengue fever and the Zika virus in the Pacific.

Not everyone, then, has the same attitude to outbreaks, Kucharski writes. “My wife works in advertising; while my research aims to stop disease transmission, she wants ideas and messages to spread. Although these outlooks seem very different, it’s increasingly possible to measure and compare contagion across industries, using ideas from one area of life to help us understand another.” And so financial crises are similar to sexually transmitted infections, ideas were used to eradicate smallpox are helping to stop gun violence, methods that stop transmission can keep it going.

Interestingly, the science is also being used to halt the spread of fake news. Scientists and health workers dealing with the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo needed to establish trust in the communities in which they worked, and it was crucial that sound information was reinforced while dismissing the swirling rumours. With Covid-19, we are now seeing how one pandemic can feed off another, as the misinformation, whether malicious or not, spreads like wildfire; a wittering and twittering of conspiracy theories.

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