Louis and Woody

The very sentence feels somehow displaced from another time, another country. In America—where bus passengers can be glimpsed watching hardcore pornography on their smart-phones, where the president re-tweets fake videos produced by white nationalists, where more movies than ever before are readily available to the casual cinephile—how can a movie be forbidden?

The film was Louis C.K.’s I Love You, Daddy, whose scheduled theatrical premiere was canceled when a series of women alleged that the filmmaker and comedian had exposed himself to them without their consent, confirming rumors that had been in the air for years. These accusations were leveled in the immediate aftermath of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged history of repeated and persistent sexual harassment and assault. To top it off, the film itself centered on a relatedly creepy subject: a relationship between a teenage girl and a much older and more powerful man. The film plainly alluded both to Woody Allen’s film Manhattan, about a similar relationship, and to Allen’s own interest in much younger women, and even made passing reference to Louis C.K.’s own rumored transgressions.

At its festival premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, before the storm broke, Manohla Dargis of the New York Times called I Love You, Daddy “a multipronged debate that circles, again and again, around the question of whether it is possible, permissible and morally justifiable to love the art and loathe the artist.” The rumors of the filmmaker’s own transgressions even contributed to the artistic frisson she experienced. But watching it again after those rumors were confirmed, the same critic admitted that “the jokes no longer landed; its shocks felt uglier, cruder.” The movie was the same, but the viewer had changed, awakened to a consciousness that not only was she looking at a movie, but other people were watching her watching it, the filmmaker very much included. And she no longer liked the complicity of her laughter.

Nor was she alone. In the new climate, nobody wanted to be seen promoting or even making available a film that looked like a perfect storm of entitled-male apologetics. If Louis C.K. stood accused of exposing himself to numerous women who had no desire to see that, and of exploiting his power in the industry to avoid any consequence for doing so, his film seemed itself to be another version of the same thing, roping the audience into a kind of abusive complicity. So I Love You, Daddy was shelved by its distributor, The Orchard. Only movie critics and others lucky enough to have received advance screeners would have a chance to see it.

When I put out word that I had gotten my hands on one of these screeners, several friends expressed an immediate interest, whether because they were fans or just for the cachet of seeing something forbidden. The ease with which I was able to fill my living room suggests that lack of audience was not a primary factor in The Orchard’s decision to pull the film. But by washing their hands of the film, they had changed its context yet again.

From a darkly funny exploration of our relationship with creepy men who make great art, the accusations had turned it into a self-justifying work by one of those very creepy men. Now, after being pulled, it had become a furtive peek under the rock, a glimpse inside a mind we were no longer supposed to examine but merely to condemn. My friends and I saw something we weren’t supposed to see, about a relationship that isn’t supposed to be allowed, and about everyone’s inability to really speak or do anything about it once it’s out in the open. The film’s suppression had made it an essential commentary on the very cultural moment that it seemed to exemplify.

So what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to speak about what’s under the rock? One answer—and a very good one—is that this is the wrong question. In this moment of #MeToo and #TimesUp, the most important people to hear from are women, both those who were abused or silenced by the men who are now rightly being exposed for their behavior and, more generally, all those who have been champing at the bit to take the lead. Take the lead they should, and the erstwhile gatekeepers of our cultural industry should finally just give them room to run and let the race go to the swiftest rather than the familiar old warhorses.

But the work of those men isn’t actually going anywhere, and the history of revolutionary suppression should not incline anyone to optimism about that approach to directing people’s attention. Whether we want to admit it or not, a lot of people are still interested in what’s under the rock.

Dargis has it backwards. The question isn’t whether one can love art by an artist one loathes, nor even if one can love a person whose behavior one loathes. In 1992, when his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn burst into the open, Woody Allen defended it by saying, “The heart wants what it wants,” and as far as that goes his statement is correct: The heart does want what it wants; it doesn’t ask whether it may before it loves. The question is, how may that love be expressed? What kind of art can a person who does or wishes to do loathsome things actually make? And what do we see, when we look, and keep looking, whether at this kind of art or, if we find a kinship with it, at ourselves?

* * *

The most basic measure of a film’s success is whether it keeps the viewer’s interest. Did you stay in your seat, immersed in the created world? Or did your attention wander? And, afterward, did you keep thinking about it, arguing with it and with those who also experienced it? Or did it fade quickly into memory’s wallpaper? On these measures, at least in my experience, I Love You, Daddy was a smashing success. But it also wasn’t exactly the film I had expected.

It is worth describing the plot in some detail, since readers may not get to see the movie themselves for some time. I Love You, Daddy centers on Glen (played by Louis C.K. himself), a television writer and showrunner at the peak of fame, with one hit show on the air and a pilot for another that gets picked up in the first 10 minutes of action. Glen has a jet (or, as he protests, a share thereof), an infinite-ceilinged Manhattan apartment, a bitter ex-wife (Helen Hunt) over whom he lords his success, and a gorgeous daughter who says she loves him every time she sees him (hence the title).

He has everything, and so we know that this is going to be a story about losing. And there is every evidence that down is where we are headed. Glen barely inhabits the life he’s in. He shows no signs of actually living in his gorgeous apartment. His relationship with his daughter, China (Chloë Grace Moretz), is passive and empty; she has only just arrived (she normally lives with her mother) when she begs permission to leave again, back to the beaches of Florida, where she had just spent spring break.

Louis C.K. and Chloë Grace Moretz as Glen and China in ‘I Love You, Daddy’ [Image: Pig Newton, Inc.]

The professional and creative realm in which Glen is apparently succeeding isn’t going any better. Glen doesn’t want to make the show he’s just sold. He’s doing it because this is what you do—when you have a chance to make a show, you make the show. So before much of anything has even happened in this movie, we already know that this is not going to be a film about a bad man who makes great art, but rather a film about an artist—and a man; good, bad, who knows?—who has lost touch with his art, and what he does instead.

What he does is fire his lead actress so he can cast a movie star, Grace (Rose Byrne), even though her visible pregnancy creates obvious problems for the series—because he wants to sleep with her, which he then proceeds to do. He tells her that he needs her inspiration to write the part, and perhaps he even believes this, but what he winds up eventually writing is unworthy of his talents—a failure she is the first to call him on.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, Glen dithers while his daughter begins a flirtation and then a relationship with Glen’s film-director idol, Leslie Goodwin (John Malkovich). Leslie has a well-known interest in underage girls; he admits this frankly to China when she asks about it, averring with disarming cynicism that his interest is widely shared and that what distinguishes him is his willingness to own up to it. He seduces the 17-year-old with a deft combination of flattery and condescension, and before you know it he has whisked her off to Paris in the face of Glen’s ineffectual refusal of permission.

After his daughter’s absurdly over-the-top 18th-birthday party, Glen finally takes his best friend Maggie’s advice and lays down the law to China. For his pains, he is rejected by her. Rejected by Grace as well, he never manages to get his new series off the ground. And in the penultimate scene, he watches his artistic idol Leslie Goodwin collect the awards and praise Glen used to win.

* * *

Summarized this way, it sounds like quite the self-pitying narrative (and also quite like the arc of a Woody Allen film from the director’s heyday). Poor Glen: He had it all, and now he has nothing. But under the surface, this is a story not about losing one’s status, nor even one’s talent, but about losing one’s authority—artistic and parental—and only after losing it truly understanding where it came from in the first place.

When, in a post-coital argument with Grace, Glen worries that China doesn’t have the emotional resources to be able to hold her own with Leslie, Grace says, in so many words: Well, whose fault is that? If she’s so helpless, Glen must not have done a very good job preparing her for the world. In which case, from Grace’s perspective, maybe China is better off being taken under the wing of a cultured and sophisticated older man like Leslie (whatever his intentions) than being left to the ministrations of the sorts of frat boys she has been hanging out with on her jaunts to Florida.

But why is that the choice? How did China wind up being the kind of girl whom a guy like Leslie would know was a good prospect? The answer to that turns us back, inevitably, to art and the cost of making it.

Grace (Rose Byrne) and Glen (Louis C.K.) argue in ‘I Love You, Daddy.’ [Image: Pig Newton, Inc.]

Claire Dederer, in her much-discussed Paris Review essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” grasped the essential selfishness of the artistic life, the necessity of rejecting obligations to parents, communities, spouses, and children and unblocking the dark wellsprings of one’s own passion and desire in order to complete the act of creation. That selfishness doesn’t have to manifest in infidelity or in damaging neglect, much less in rape or abuse. But its very necessity means that one cannot know for certain what will be the consequences of putting the work first or where those desires will flow once the well is unblocked. And the track record—at least of a variety of much-lionized male geniuses—does not inspire confidence in the artist’s ability to remain consistently faithful to anything beyond his art.

The selfishness necessary for the creation of great art hovers in the background of I Love You, Daddy. It’s there in Glen’s professional life, in his relationship with his long-suffering producing partner, Paula (Edie Falco). After Glen backs her into an impossible logistical corner, Paula rants about the crazy things he has made her do over the years in the name of art—most notably, suspending a poor frightened horse above the ocean for a shot that didn’t even make the final cut. But when he decides to fire his lead actress to hire Grace, Paula calls him out, asking whether that decision was really about making art. If Glen is in the thrall of the muse’s tyranny, that’s one thing, but if the muse has departed and Glen has decided just to be a tyrant, Paula is not going to respect that abuse of authority.

Glen is as muddled about what legitimates his parental authority as he is about what legitimates his artistic authority. He thinks that authority is about making rules, while having a good relationship with his daughter means indulging her so she’ll say she loves him, and so they are inherently in conflict. We see the baleful consequences of this mistake when Grace tells him that as a teenager she herself had an affair with an older man. Glen has the gall to say with authority that she was raped even if she doesn’t think so—and thereby closes off the avenue to trust that could have been the foundation of a real relationship.

The essential selfishness of Glen’s indulgence of his daughter comes back in China’s lament, late in the film, when her father finally decides to assert his authority—and in the process attacks his own daughter for the spoiled, shallow life he let her lead—that he truly gave her nothing, because she has nothing of her own. One reason for that is that he wasn’t around to be the father she needed, because he was off suspending poor frightened horses above the ocean.

Glen comes face to face with his failures as a father at the same moment that he comes face to face with the departure of his muse. Without the art, all he has is his selfishness. To have anything at all, he’ll have to learn to be something like a human being again: respectful of his producer, appropriate with his actors, available to his daughter. As Paula tells him at the Emmys, if he’s no longer a great writer, at least he’s a competent craftsman. If he can be a human being, he’ll work. And he needs to work, if only to have something to do.

Glen (Louis C.K.) and his producing partner Paula (Edie Falco) fight. [Image: Pig Newton, Inc.]

That’s what the movie I saw was about: an artist who loses his way, artistically; engages in gross sexual power games to compensate; and discovers not only that the art cannot be recovered but that, in the course of being an artist, he’s also lost the most important human relationship he might have had.

Is that self-justifying on Louis C.K.’s part? To some degree. He seems to be saying to the audience, Yeah, maybe those rumors about me are true, but you’ll accept my behavior as the price you pay for my genius. In the world of the movie, Leslie Goodwin is an unquestionably great artist and his awfulness is very much rooted in his selfishness. He professes no intentions in his life, no particular responsibility to China or to Glen or to anyone. His only responsibility, the only place where he has an intention, is in his work. Otherwise, it’s all just experience. Stuff happens, or it doesn’t, and he takes some emotion from whatever he experiences, savors that, and turns it into art.

But on another level, the movie is aware that this isn’t the whole picture. Leslie says the best part of his relationships with young girls is being rejected by them when they mature (though it is he who shows minimal interest in China when she finally approaches him sexually, right after her 18th birthday). But Louis C.K. knows, and Glen seems to have figured out by the end, that a relationship between two grownups—more specifically, between himself and his adult daughter, treated as an adult—is much deeper and more meaningful than the exquisite pain of rejection. Which, I suspect, is the key to understanding where I Love You, Daddy came from.

Louis C.K.’s own daughters, on whom he famously dotes, are approaching China’s age. They’ve probably heard the bit from his standup where he talks about fathers’ confusion about their role in their daughters’ becoming sexual beings—in his view, that role is: nothing. “But what if she has a bad sexual experience?” his imaginary confused father asks. “Oh, she’s going to have a number of those,” Louis C.K. replies, before describing life for women as basically walking around with an umbrella to deflect a rain of unwelcome phalluses.

The image was hilarious when I first heard it, precisely because of its knowingness. And yes, it’s become a lot less funny now that we know just how specifically knowing it was. But the bit wasn’t actually about men and women. It was about fathers and daughters, and it was a declaration of abdication.

Men get a lot of deserved flak for making the argument that you should treat women well because “how would you feel if it were your daughter?”—the flak being: Women are people in their own right; they don’t only have worth or value in terms of their relation to men. But the point is more fruitful if it is turned around. How can you be a good father to your daughter, particularly as she becomes a sexual being, if your relationship to women is so screwed up? What can you give her if that’s all you’ve got?

In that comedy bit, Louis C.K.’s answer is: nothing. I Love You, Daddy seems to me to be a complication of that “nothing,” a wondering whether that “nothing” is a function of being an artist, or of being powerful, or of his own particular demons.

It’s far from a completely honest confrontation with those demons. But a completely honest confrontation may be in him. I hope, when he returns to work, he undertakes it. Because we already know what that return to work looks like for an artist resolutely determined to use art to escape the darkness within rather than to explore it. That’s the story of Woody Allen’s career, and its arc isn’t a happy one, artistically speaking.

* * *

I Love You, Daddy has a multilayered relationship with Woody Allen and his work. Leslie Goodwin is clearly a Woody Allenesque figure, a critically admired and extraordinarily productive American film director who has succeeded in spite of an aura of sexual creepiness, specifically a rumor of having had sexual relations with a minor. John Malkovich makes the character his own and is in no sense doing a Woody Allen parody (it’s hard to imagine Allen prancing about in an ornate Chinese robe, as Malkovich does), but the allusion is nonetheless apparent, and in that respect, I Love You, Daddy does revolve around questions of how we relate to artistic heroes who are also creepy guys.

John Malkovich and Chloë Grace Moretz in Louis C.K.’s ‘I Love You, Daddy’ [Image: Pig Newton, Inc.]

But I Love You, Daddy also clearly recalls and comments on a particular Woody Allen film: Manhattan (1979), which centers on the relationship between the 42-year-old Isaac (played by Allen himself) and Tracy, the 17-year-old high school student he’s dating (played by Mariel Hemingway). Allen’s lush black-and-white cinematography and gorgeous Gershwin score are more alluded to than mimicked in Louis C.K.’s movie, but again, the allusions are clear.

The obvious thematic similarity between the films involves relationships between young women and much older men. But the more important connection is on the level of the story of the artist and his art. Isaac, like Glen, is a television writer and is on the brink of a decision that is the opposite of the one Glen makes in I Love You, Daddy. Early in the film, Isaac gets fed up with the dreck that he’s making and impulsively quits his job to write a book. As a consequence, he has to give up the beautiful apartment he can no longer afford. Whereas Glen goes for the money and loses sight of what it is to be an artist, Isaac quits for the sake of artistic integrity.

That choice is one the real-life Allen made early in his career. From the start, Allen raised money for his projects without even giving investors the scripts, and he still demands complete artistic freedom. In the late 1970s, Allen took that money and ran, making a string of films that took very real artistic chances to explore something important to Allen the artist. Beginning with Annie Hall (1977), a remarkably experimental film in formal terms, particularly for a romantic comedy, and extending through Interiors (1978), his foray into serious drama, to Stardust Memories (1980), his raised middle finger to his critics and fans for rejecting his dramatic effort, Allen sought to shake his reputation as a “mere” comic and establish himself as a serious artist.

No film in this period was riskier than Manhattan, precisely because of the creepiness of the romance at its center, a creative choice that Allen himself feared might have opened the kimono a bit too far. As it turned out, in 1979 Allen needn’t have worried. Manhattan was nominated for a host of prestigious awards, including Oscars for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress, and won a wide array of accolades, particularly from foreign critics. Honesty had proven the best policy. But did audiences at the time see just what he was revealing?

To some extent they did; witness Pauline Kael’s remark, “What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?” But it isn’t an absurd thing to try, if you realize what those values are. Recall that Isaac, Allen’s character, has two relationships in the film, one with Tracy, the teenager, the other with Mary, played by Diane Keaton. Isaac spends much of the first part of the film holding Tracy at an emotional distance, claiming that it’s for her own good; she should treat the relationship as an education and then move on to a more age-appropriate lover. Meanwhile, he warms to Mary, who begins the film as the mistress of his married best friend, and warms her to him through the pickup artistry of negging: insulting her, belittling her, and otherwise cutting this opinionated woman down to what he considers her proper size.

Isaac and Mary’s relationship is ugly, but it’s real, with an obvious chemistry between the two performers. When it ends, it ends in an ugly but adult way: Mary leaves Isaac for her former lover. By contrast, Isaac’s relationship with Tracy is a blank. He has essentially no interest in her as a person and barely talks to her about anything except how she shouldn’t get too attached to him. When Mary first becomes available to him, Isaac dumps Tracy unceremoniously, and when he decides he wants her back he says the most selfish and emotionally manipulative things, with no regard for her welfare, in order to reclaim her.

Mariel Hemingway and Woody Allen in Allen’s ‘Manhattan’ [Image: MGM]

It’s not hard to look down on Isaac for being shallow, sex-obsessed, and manipulative, or for preferring a teenager to an adult because then he’s more completely in control. But all the characters in Manhattan are shallow, sex-obsessed, and manipulative. The journey Isaac takes over the course of the film is from resisting Tracy emotionally (while still sleeping with her) because he knows they can’t have a mature relationship to realizing that having a mature relationship isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The film’s very overt style, the burnished silver tones, the soaring Gershwin, all are making the case for the values Isaac comes to see as central, which are ultimately aesthetic, rooted in his own taste—one subject on which he is completely confident.

Where does that leave relationships with women? From the beginning, women in Manhattan are prizes for men to contest. But Tracy in particular is little more than a beautiful art object. Isaac lists her face along with the particular books, movies, music, and food that make life worth living. Tracy’s face even has theological significance; God, Isaac intimates while on a carriage ride with her, may do horrible things, but if He can make a Tracy, then at least He’s a great artist, and that justifies the rest.

* * *

Why should Louis C.K. have used Manhattan as the basis for his own movie? The obvious connection tells us nothing about why Allen is an important figure for someone like Louis C.K. to consider or why the “Woody Allen problem” should matter to him in particular. Manhattan is the film Louis C.K. riffs on precisely because its flamboyant aestheticism throws the problem of the selfish artist into sharp relief. It feels like Louis C.K. is asking himself, If I keep going the way I’m going, am I going to turn into Woody Allen? And am I okay with that?

Speaking purely in artistic terms, if you followed the progress of Allen’s career after Manhattan, you probably would be okay with that. In his great run through the mid-’80s, Allen made a series of finely crafted and nostalgia-tinted pieces that were the most durable works of his career: Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, and Hannah and Her Sisters. There is a level of confident control in these films that Allen never achieved before or since. They are the work of a man who knows what he believes and why he believes it. And what he believes is that life is fundamentally miserable; that trying to connect in an emotional way with other human beings is an invitation to deeper misery; and that immersion in art and beauty is the best way to distract oneself from those cruel facts about existence. Allen did not so much discover or reveal in these films as expound, but he expounded masterfully.

But there was one time at the end of this stretch—probably the only time—that Allen explored and revealed, as he had in Manhattan, by delving into himself. That was in his 1992 film touching once again on themes of recombining couples and intergenerational romance: Husbands and Wives. Inspired, as Allen’s work so often was, by Ingmar Bergman—in this case by Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage—the film is a caustic portrait of marital collapse. And that collapse feels significant, feels like it matters to the author—likely because it was created and released in the context of Allen’s own marital collapse: the end of his relationship with Mia Farrow and the exposure of his relationship with Farrow’s daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, hard upon which came the explosive accusation that he had sexually abused his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow.

At the end of Annie Hall, Alvy Singer writes a play within which he can rewrite the ending of his relationship with Annie so that it comes out happy. This, Alvy explains, is one reason to make art: to revise reality in a more pleasant form. No one would accuse Woody Allen of having made a pleasant movie in Husbands and Wives, but the film does have the feel of self-justifying revisionism. It’s notable that Gabe, the character Allen himself plays, declines to pursue a relationship with a much younger woman while Allen himself began a relationship with his longtime lover’s daughter when she was still in her teens; meanwhile, Jack (played by Sydney Pollack) does leave his wife (Judy Davis) for a younger woman only to repent and return to a relationship that remains distinctly unfulfilling on a physical level. These are perfectly reasonable dramatic choices, but they are also ones that read quite differently once you know about Allen’s own activities at the time. Still, despite the air of self-justification, the film has considerable power, perhaps because even the act of constructing such a justification requires access to the feelings that need to be justified.

In Woody Allen’s visceral ‘Husbands and Wives’ (1992), Jack (Sydney Pollack) fights with his much younger girlfriend, Sam (Lysette Anthony). [Image: TriStar]

It would have been completely unremarkable, after such a personally tumultuous year, for Allen to take a break from filmmaking, at least to discover what would motivate him artistically going forward. Regardless of whether you believe or doubt Dylan Farrow’s accusations, regardless of whether you find Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi understandable or monstrous, the emotional turmoil of that year must have been significant. But Allen continued to make movies, typically putting out a movie a year; and while some were better and some were worse, he never again made a movie that felt deeply rooted in any kind of authentic feeling. Rather, over time he retreated into a sterile aestheticism, until eventually he was making lovely tourist postcards of romantic European locales and fooling himself that they were works of the intellect.

No film is more emblematic of late Woody Allen than Midnight in Paris (2011), which was also his highest-grossing hit. It is a pure wish-fulfillment fantasy in which Gil, standing in for the audience and the author, is flattered by the transparent stupidity and vulgarity of every person he knows. The film’s pretensions to consequence depend on its central conceit: At midnight, Gil (Owen Wilson) is transported back in time to other eras in Paris’s storied artistic history, only to find that, at all times in the past, the great artists he admires were dissatisfied with the state of art, culture, and conversation in their world and looked back longingly to a golden age further past. Gil—and Allen—are thus further flattered that they truly belong in the company of these greats and that the painful awareness of pervasive stupidity and vulgarity is just the price you pay for genius. Having learned this, Gil can leave his awful fiancée and instantly take up with a Parisian girl of whom he knows literally nothing but the beauty of her face and who needs to know nothing about him before walking off with him into the romantic Paris drizzle (the Woody Allen equivalent of a sunset).

How does a once-compelling filmmaker come to make a film like that? Consider the ending of I Love You, Daddy, as Glen contemplates a future in which he will continue to work not because he believes in it, nor because he needs the money, but because he needs to be working, because work is all he’s really got. Perhaps the reason Louis C.K. is thinking about coming to such a pass, in a film all about Woody Allen the artist and Woody Allen the problem, has something to do with why, and how, Woody Allen makes movies.

* * *

As it happens, a good guide to why and how Woody Allen makes movies was published just last year. In Start to Finish: Woody Allen and the Art of Moviemaking, Eric Lax, Allen’s friend and biographer, takes the reader behind the scenes, following Allen through all the stages in the creation of one of his films. The film he shadowed Allen on, Irrational Man (2015), is a mediocre creation, though Lax could not have known this at the time: It’s an unfocused musing on Allen’s familiar nihilism that never finds its genre and was ignored by both critics and audiences. But the unexceptional nature of the film in question turns out to be a blessing, because it lets the reader observe the process without being distracted by the product. The resulting book is at turns insightful and infuriating but most of all an impressive reproduction in prose form of the way in which filmmaking engrosses one in the tedium of repetitive and monotonous detail.

The book is divided broadly into the same sections as filmmaking itself: writing the script, raising the funds, attaching the cast, scouting locations, designing and building costumes and sets; then shooting the film, location by location and, within each location, scene by scene, and then post-production: editing, selecting music, correcting color, and marrying all these elements together. Lax walks through each phase in turn, letting the reader observe how Allen approaches each and offering some observations on how Allen’s approach is distinctive.

Some distinctions are more notable than others. Allen is far from the only writer who has a lengthy file of everything from jotted-down premises to partially complete scripts into which he rummages when looking for his next project. It is hardly surprising that the octogenarian Allen relies on his casting directors to keep him aware of new talent or that he leans heavily on the skills of some of the best cinematographers and designers working. What may be more surprising to readers is how little guidance he appears to give these artists, other than a general knowledge of his taste. He guides his actors even less, generally declining to share the script as a whole, or to discuss their parts in any detail, or to rehearse. As Lax describes it, Allen seems to come to the set with a very clear idea in his mind of what he wants but little plan for how to communicate that idea and a peculiarly fixed notion that filming with little preparation is the best way to get from actors a relaxed, natural, and unmannered performance.

What emerges is a portrait of Allen as a kind of control freak, the kind who fancies himself an improviser. He won’t block a scene in advance, preferring to figure out how to move in a space on the day of the shoot, and he often tells his actors to improvise lines. But he also berates them and gives them line readings if they aren’t giving the reading he heard in his head, and his instruction to his actors resembles Hamlet—another anxious writer—in his advice to the players: Don’t do too much acting.

Early in the book, Allen compares himself to Picasso, another ferociously productive artist, pointing out that Picasso made plenty of lousy works of art along with his greatest work, because he was just always working and let the public sort out after the fact which work was great. Allen doesn’t explicitly compare himself to Picasso in another telling way: Both artists were able to turn themselves into brands. When you look at a Picasso, you always know it’s a Picasso; a great deal of what he’s selling is a signature style. The same is very much true for Woody Allen and has much to do with why he has been able to continue to get his films financed and why actors are so eager to work with him. But the comfortable predictability and social signaling power of a brand are detractions from great art, if they aren’t antithetical to it.

Later, Allen contrasts himself with his hero, Ingmar Bergman. Bergman, Allen says, wrote without really understanding what he was writing. He’d shoot a film thinking he knew what something meant but knowing from experience that only afterwards would he come to understand what he was really doing. Allen, by his own self-description, is thoroughly in control on a cerebral level. He has a very clear idea of what he wants, because what he started with was that idea. And when he gets something different, he sees that as a happy accident if it worked out—or a failure if it didn’t—rather than a discovery.

It’s hard to believe that this is the mentality that could produce such a structurally weird film as Annie Hall or elicit such a memorably delightful performance from Diane Keaton as the title character. Nor can I see, in this book, much of the Allen who directed Husbands and Wives, a film that departed radically from Allen’s preferred style of cinematography because the choice was necessary to tell that particular story, and where the story itself seemed to spring from somewhere visceral and personal. But I can certainly believe that the film Lax followed, Irrational Man, was written and directed by the person Lax describes. It feels like a very old idea from the file (fleshed out with embarrassingly out-of-date intellectual references) and on the screen never manages to show the audience why it needed to be a movie in the first place.

So why did Woody Allen make Irrational Man? The answer seems to be that it was time to make a movie. As Allen himself describes it, a major reason he makes movies in the first place is to beguile the time and distract himself from the meaninglessness of existence. Irrational Man is a film about a man who commits murder in order to be able to reliably have an erection, made by a man who claims to make movies not so much to feel alive as to avoid feeling the approach of death. And not once in this highly detailed book about the making of the movie does Allen or his amanuensis note the irony or how the film failed to mine that irony for the black comedy that could have been.

Take Allen at his word, and say it is meaninglessness he is fleeing. Filmmaking is certainly engrossing enough to distract one from much else. Even the tedium (and there is a vast amount of tedium in filmmaking) is engrossing, energizing, the “hurry up and wait” of a battlefield but without the physical casualties. But I can’t shake the feeling, from reading this book, that it is casualties of another sort—the emotional casualties of broken relationships and of the ongoing battle with oneself—that he is truly fleeing; not the meaninglessness of life, but what its meaning is, at least for him.

In other words, Woody Allen has turned into precisely what it looks like Glen has turned into at the end of Louis C.K.’s film, I Love You, Daddy: a talented craftsman who is no longer a great artist, who must keep writing and directing because that’s just what you do—because you have to work or you’ll be left alone with nothing but yourself.

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Until recently, I would have said that Woody Allen will keep making movies until he drops dead in the director’s chair. In the #MeToo era, though, Allen’s brand has finally been dented, with an ever-lengthening list of actresses who appeared in his earlier films declaring that they would not do so again. Time will tell, though Allen himself has only so much time left. But I am cynical enough about both the moviegoing audience and Hollywood to suspect that, if he wants to, Allen will still be able to raise the money for a film—and if he raises the money, people will work with him, even if the most heinous allegations can no longer be swept aside. People need the work. They don’t even need to believe in their own hearts that they are working for a great artist.

But his work won’t truly matter to anyone else if it doesn’t matter to him as something other than work, if it doesn’t spring from something essential. And the time when that was the case has long since passed.

It hasn’t for Louis C.K., though.

At the end of I Love You, Daddy, Glen watches his hero Leslie Goodwin taking the accolades Glen thought would be his own, and propounding an aesthetic creed as the basis for his success. Feelings, good or bad, are truffles, Leslie says—things to be savored as pure experience. Making art means shooting a scene set in California in Morocco instead, because of the exquisite color of the walls, and damn the suits. Glen, meanwhile, girds himself to work again; after all, work is just work, the muse has departed, and he no longer has the authority of a great artist to justify his whims and fancies.

A glum Glen (Louis C.K.) sits with Leslie (John Malkovich) after Leslie has received an Emmy in ‘I Love You, Daddy.’ [Image: Pig Newton, Inc.]

But then, in a final scene, he is reunited with his daughter. As he listens to China talk about the life she has started to make for herself, he is clearly delighted merely to be in her presence. It is not an aesthetic delight; it is not a truffle. It is a human feeling—the delight of being connected to another person whom you love.

The scene is unearned, because we don’t see Glen do anything to get there (his best friend Maggie arranges the meeting without warning either Glen or China). Nor has he earned any credit for China’s emergence as a responsible adult; to get there, she had to leave him behind. The scene is there as a declaration of independence from Leslie’s aestheticism. But it’s not clear that the film sees how one can be human that way while also making great art. That may well have been why Louis C.K. was brooding on Woody Allen and why he made the film. Is he still brooding in the same manner now that his own hidden transgressions have been exposed? And if so, where will that take him in his next chapter?

We’ll find out. I’m at least as sure that Louis C.K. is going to work again as I am about Woody Allen, probably sooner than he ought to. He has repurchased the rights to I Love You, Daddy from The Orchard and is likely just waiting for the right opportunity to release it himself. He’s probably got an idea file as large as Allen’s and at least as interesting, and when he decides to dip into it, he’ll put his own money down again, and people will work with him. If they’ll work with Mel Gibson and Roman Polanski, they’ll work with Louis C.K.

The question is whether that work will be driven by an engagement with his experience or as a way to distract himself—and his audience—from it. In his open letter addressing the allegations against him, Louis C.K. said he would now “step back and take a long time to listen.” I hope he does that—I hope he doesn’t go back to work too quickly. But most of all, I hope he remembers the only really important words he said in that letter: “These stories are true.”

Louis C.K. struck a chord with audiences from the beginning because it seemed like he was speaking truth, even ugly, uncomfortable truth, and that truth resonated. We know now that we didn’t get the whole truth. But the whole truth is still there. And judging by the ever-widening circles of men being exposed, I think the rest of the truth will resonate pretty strongly too. And if there is an artist out there more capable of an unflinching exploration of that truth from the inside, I don’t know who that is. All Louis C.K. has to do is not flinch and keep listening.

Great art, contra Alvy Singer, is not about rewriting your life in a more pleasing or self-gratifying form. It’s about emotional truth and conveying that truth to other people. And you can’t convey a truth that you are trying to hide from others or yourself. For that reason, I hope Louis C.K. comes to see his humiliation as a blessing. And while his personal redemption is really of no particular concern to anyone but himself, for my part, I hope that the way he finds it involves making art out of the truth and not art designed as an escape from it.

Noah Millman is a filmmaker, a columnist for the Week, and a senior editor at the American Conservative.