Culture Is Healing

Post-election, celebrities seem to be rethinking the excesses of Woke cancel culture.

An interesting side effect of Trump’s broad-based victory seems to be that it’s encouraging formerly Woke celebrities to act more decently and to regret their participating in cancel culture pile-ons during the Great Awokening.

From IndieWire:

Rebecca Hall: I ‘Regret’ Apologizing for Working with Woody Allen

"I don’t think that we should be the ones who are doing judge and jury on this," Hall, who appeared in two Allen films, said six years after publicly denouncing the director.

By Samantha Bergeson
November 18, 2024 1:45 pm

Woody Allen is a complicated figure. For example, I found his critically-acclaimed 1979 film Manhattan distasteful because it was an obviously autobiographical film about a 40-something celebrity sleeping with a high school girl. Allen was clearly at the peak of his powers, so I could see why everybody else in 1979 was so enthralled by it, but come on, famous middle-aged men should stay away from high school girls they aren’t going to marry.

But Allen went on to make a number of wonderful movies in the 1980s, and he occasionally makes a good one now and then ever since.

I once compared Woody Allen’s endless career in film to Pete Rose’s endless career in baseball. The late Rose of course was kept out of the Hall of Fame due to a gambling scandal. But I’m not much inclined to denounce Rose over it considering how much he accomplished.

Since then, there have been two more Woody Allen scandals:

Allen marrying his girlfriend Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi. (But they’ve been married for three decades now.)

And during the Great Awokening, Allen’s presumed son Ronan Farrow accusing him of molesting another very young sibling. Note, however, that Ronan has intense personal motivations: he’s gotten himself a lot of plastic surgery so that he looks more like his conception of who his real father must be (in his mind), Mia’s first husband Frank Sinatra, rather than Woody.

This is what Hall denounced her director over, despite the lack of hard evidence one way or the other.

This was the kind of he said / she said whoop-tee-doo that became such a popular participation sport during the #MeToo era, but one that I, personally, felt highly disinclined to try to disentangle during the Believe All Women years (or, in the case of Ronan Farrow, a man, the Believe Whatever the Online Mob Believes At the Moment craze).