Do you wanna know why I absolutely despise Woody Allen?
Okay, there’s a slew of reasons. Of course, the allegations against him turned him into a well-loathed director to most, although I’m not really sure how the court opinions turned out, or how they affected public opinions. What I do know, however, is that I have a particularly personal reason to dislike him on top of that. It’s because he’s pretentious.
I suppose I should begin with a confession. I’ve only watched two of his movies. But one was Annie Hall, probably his most important and famous movie, so I imagine I can adequately speak about the way he comes across in his movies. It’s a movie that oozes with his pretentiousness, and it’s probably also part of why so many people dislike him. I mean, for one, he cast himself as the main character, which should show you how highly he thinks of himself. That character spends the movie being famously neurotic, and I imagine Allen snickering to himself as he wrote those lines, no doubt many of them verbatim from his own life. He probably thought they were the epitome of wit and charm, but what they come off as instead is dorkish and pessimistic and irony-poisoned, making him the type of person you’d really just avoid at a party if you knew him in real life. But of course, in his movie, his self-insert character is so interesting and witty that Diane Keaton as Annie Hall (in a character written for her) falls in love with him. In fact, he implies that he gets a lot of action, no doubt with girls so impressed by his superior intelligence and humor when compared to their feeble minds. He even plays his hand at being a junior Freudian psychoanalyst, as was all the rage at the time of the movie’s 1977 release, but none of his thoughts are even original.
The other Allen movie I have watched is Midnight in Paris. When I first watched it, I didn’t even know it was his movie, but I did notice the main character was eerily similar to Allen’s character in Annie Hall, once again dripping with the pretentious pseudointellectual high horse Allen seems to love so much. This time, however, he’s played by Owen Wilson, whose usual charm does cover this up slightly, except his character is still a bother to many characters around him. He has an incessant need to correct everyone, to the point of making everyone uncomfortable, and he lives in the past, in a way that seems more preening than anything. Of course, he’s also written with a vaguely misogynistic lens predictable from a man like Allen; when Wilson’s character begins disappearing at night and claims he’s time travelling (where he is secretly also falling in love with other women), his fiancé is framed as hysterical for not believing him. The character does have depth and resonance and I must admit that I still enjoyed the movie’s dreaminess anyways, but it certainly could not escape Allen’s shallow pride.
Then, of course, there was his infamous interview with the then-17-year-old model Twiggy. In a condensed form, during this interview, he asked the girl who her favorite philosopher was. She couldn’t name a favorite, as I imagine is the case with most 17-year-olds in the modern day, but he bizarrely continued to press her for an answer, as though hoping to embarrass her. Unperturbed, however, she asked him who his favorite philosopher was. Of course, he had no answer.
Okay, okay, so he’s a pretentious know-it-all jerk, even if he did reinvent a genre with Annie Hall. Great. But why does that strike such a chord with me? If you know me, you can probably guess. The unfortunate fact is, people seem to think I’m pretentious. I don’t blame them that much: I often use a litany of verbose words like superfluous and chiasmus and ontology and Iberian. For goodness’ sake, I even call them films instead of movies, and theaters instead of cinemas. The know-it-all accusation, too, has some credibility. One of my friends once said that when he's trying to make a point, I feel the need to correct every detail leading up to it before we ever get to the actual point. Unfortunately, I cannot help but notice when things or people are wrong, and often that means pointing it out because I can't imagine anyone else wanting to live like that, although I try to be as kind and thoughtful as I can be.
I really hope, however, that people don't earnestly think of me in these ways. Maybe it's narcissistic or delusional to think I matter enough for people to even think of me at all, but I really hope people do think of me. I want to be known and impactful; that has basically always been my goal. But I would hope my need to correct people and make things accurate is seen as a quirk of my devotion to truth, and I would hope my so-called “pretentious” vocabulary is seen as a mark of someone trying to be educated, elegant, and interesting. It would absolutely devastate me if instead, someone felt the need to write paragraphs excoriating me the way I just did to Mr. Allen. If this is truly how I am seen, as unjustifiably pretentious and bothersome, I would rather never be thought of again and fade into obscurity. If I am disliked, I am truly dead and lonely and it doesn't matter how happy I am with myself, for I might as well not exist at all at that point.
This question, of the way other people think of me, is vastly important to me. I don't even know why. I am who I am, and I can't–and won't–change for what others want (with the exception perhaps of my girlfriend/best friend). I'm trying to be better every day, which is all I can or need to do, so I will not change or apologize for my nature to anyone else. And I can’t be perfect for everyone. I mean, that’s what I know I’m supposed to believe. But these maxims are essentially just platitudes, regurgitated from a million after-school specials, books, motivational quotes, coming-of-age movies, and TV shows. Because even though I want to believe in this utopic ideal that I am fine as I am, I truly cannot resist the vanity of questioning how others see me and wanting to be loved by all.
So, I have effectively “told on” myself: my deep, personal hatred of Woody Allen, the layers beyond everyone else's contempt, is actually secretly a simple reflection of my own insecurity. Of course, this is no surprise. This is the way we view the world, with internalized myopia drawn from the insecurities and idiosyncrasies that lay in our deepest depths. It doesn’t make him any less ridiculous or annoying, it only means he is a way for me to examine the pathologies of my personality. In a way, he even alleviates my insecurity a little bit by reassuring me that I am indeed not as annoying as he is. So I guess I have a little to thank him for? But I can’t forgive him for being annoying, or inserting his annoying-ness into the main character of one of the most important rom-coms in history. So I still despise him, as much as one can despise someone you don’t know. Please, let me know what you think. Unless you don’t think much of me at all.
