The film director said in an interview, ‘Cancel culture is the stupidity of our generation.’
Film director Woody Allen has declared that cancel culture is “an embarrassment” and predicted that it would be remembered like the McCarthy era.
In comments made to a Spanish-language publication and translated into English by the film site World of Reel, Allen is quoted as saying:
Well, you know, the human race has consistently behaved stupidly throughout history. Cancel culture is the stupidity of our generation. Time will pass, we will look back and it will happen to us as with the McCarthy era. We will be ashamed of it. And we’ll say to ourselves, “My God, did people really do that and accept it? That teachers be fired, university professors, that scientists be discredited, that actors be put on blacklists?
People will take time to see it. Again, the example of McCarthyism serves, which was horrible in the US. Everyone was called a communist. “If you listened to folk music, communist.” It turned into something laughable. And then people started seeing it. There are already many people who see cancel culture for what it is: an embarrassment.
Allen is currently filming his first French-language film in Paris. He has been more or less forced to shoot movies overseas in recent years due to industry-wide backlash against a decades-old child-molestation accusation that came out of his bitter breakup from actress Mia Farrow. The accusation, which is that he molested his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow, is not very credible. It is complicated by the fact that Allen fell in love with and married Mia Farrow’s then college-aged adopted daughter, Soon-Yi. That is obviously icky by most normal people standards, but distinct from the issue of whether or not he molested Mia’s seven-year-old daughter in Mia’s Connecticut house that at the time was filled with Mia’s friends.
Regardless of whom one believes in this case, however, there is the reality that the accusation came out in 1992, and was litigated exhaustively and in full public view at the time, along with his relationship with Soon-Yi. For decades, actors and actresses, who had access to all of this information, were eager to be in his movies. Reviewers regularly praised his films, which routinely garnered Oscar nominations. But then #MeToo happened and Ronan Farrow used his newfound credibility to relitigate the old accusation.
It is one thing for those who sided with Mia at the time to be anti-Woody then and now. But for those who appeared in his movies to advance their careers when he was popular, it is absolutely craven to turn around and suddenly distance themselves from Allen, and vow never to work with him again. Actress Mira Sorvino actually said that Allen “tainted” her early career, even though in reality she was a middling actress who won an Oscar thanks to the brilliant role Allen wrote for her in Mighty Aphrodite.
It’s no surprise he’s become so outspoken against cancel culture.