Last week, my friend Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a terrific piece about Woody Allen and how he would approach and review Allen’s work now that he has come to the personal conclusion that Dylan Farrow is telling the truth when she says that Allen sexually abused her. I want to quote from it at length because Seitz has done something relatively rare in making his critical process public, and thus making an argument for a particular approach to Allen’s work. He writes:

Will I continue to review Allen’s new films and write about his old ones? Absolutely. This is not a court of law. I don’t have to recuse myself for having any particular feeling about Allen’s private life. I try to be upfront about disclosing external factors when responding to art. And on top of all that, nobody who watches movies or reads the news is unaware of these allegations, so there is no such thing as an unbiased take on Allen anyway. (Suggesting that a critic who has no strong emotional response to the allegations is somehow preferable seems specious to me anyway. We’re not Vulcans.)
I’ll strive to compartmentalize my belief in Dylan’s account while I review Woody Allen films that have nothing to do with the subject of parents and children, trust, sexual assault or anything in the wheelhouse of this awful story. If he makes a good movie I’ll give it a positive review, and if he makes a bad one I’ll pan it. I won’t bring the allegations into every review—unless the material seems to demand that kind of response, which is sometimes unavoidable with Allen, a biographically inclined filmmaker who keeps revisiting the same pet subjects and the same relationship configurations (including older man/younger woman—which pretty much guarantees that critics will reference the fact that his wife was once his girlfriend’s adopted daughter).
But I doubt I’ll be watching Allen’s earlier films again, unless I need to refresh my memory of them for an article about Allen, or some other filmmaker who referenced his work or learned from it.

After the piece was published and went big, Seitz added a note at the end of it. “I was surprised by how much attention this piece received, and somewhat taken aback by the number of readers who were of the opinion, essentially, ‘if you don’t approve of this artist, you should never write about them again,'” he wrote. “As if it were possible to somehow ‘starve’ an artist or celebrity of attention and ‘punish’ them or make them go away.”

Obviously, I agree with Seitz that critics have an obligation to cover the culture. And I think the people who suggest that we should stop covering Allen and artists like him as a moral stance are missing the point. If we ignore our duty to write about Allen’s work even and especially in light of the allegations against him, that void in coverage will be filled by writing that proceeds from the assumption that there’s nothing morally ambiguous or queasy about Allen’s continued prominence.

But I’d also go a step further than Seitz and suggest that when artists we love are accused of heinous crimes, that’s an important moment to go back and examine their previous work.* It’s absolutely true that “Manhattan,” one of the movies that is cited most frequently in discussions of Allen and his alleged misdeeds given that the character Allen plays is an adult man “dating a girl who does homework,” has been poisoned by Allen’s personal life since it was released in 1979. But while it may be painful to look back at a movie that, as Seitz wrote, “used to just be beautiful to me,” it’s probably useful to examine work that we responded to in the past, that we find agonizing today, and to try to understand what shifted in the intervening years.

Because that’s the thing. The knowledge that Allen married a sister of his children and stands accused of abusing Dylan Farrow doesn’t change Woody Allen’s movies; it changes us. The raft of rape allegations against Bill Cosby doesn’t perform some alchemy that transforms the text of “The Cosby Show.” But they undermine the personal narrative of real-world success that made it easier for Cosby to sell the ideas in that series, and to lecture on black self-improvement in the years after the series went off the air.

In other words, looking back at the old work of artists who have been accused of grave misdeeds isn’t just uncomfortable because it makes us harder to admire things we once adored. It’s difficult to do because revisiting these works forces us to reckon with ideas we once found acceptable, or at least unobjectionable, and that we no longer do.

Confronting these works and our own past reaction to them is a form of taking moral inventory, and the results aren’t always terribly comfortable.

What was it that made the 26-year age difference between Mariel Hemingway and Allen in “Manhattan” seem cute or whimsical or at worst mere evidence of Allen’s character’s neurosis to us, rather than predatory or sinister? Why did it take real-world allegations of sexual misconduct to make Allen’s child molestation jokes seem something less than funny?

Or, when it comes to Cosby, what was it about a gospel of self-reliance rather than structural change that seemed appealing, even before the charges against Cosby became widely known? (This is a question that Ta-Nehisi Coates took on at length in his 2008 profile of Cosby for the Atlantic.)

Watching works by artists like these, knowing what we know now, is a way to not just look at Allen’s art, but at ourselves. What parts of us have changed? How has time refined our moral sensibilities? When we avoid going back to see the ugliness in work we found beautiful, we’re avoiding the sight of a violent slash running down the middle of a masterpiece. But in some cases, we’re also avoiding confronting the flaws in our own past judgement.

*As I’ve written in the past, I’m a big advocate for the idea that, if you dislike the idea of giving even small amount of ticket, rental or royalty money to artists who are accused of grave misconduct, you should give the price of your ticket to a charity that works in the area of that alleged misconduct.

Woody Allen's adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, revisited her sexual abuse claim against the filmmaker in a letter posted on the website of the New York Times. (Reuters)