I loved him on the early Daily Show and especially on Strangers with Candy, a piece of brutally unflinching comedy that would never in a million years exist now. I never thought his faux-neocon bit was that funny, but I got why people liked it, and to be fair, I'd left the world of cable TV by then.
I loved him on the early Daily Show and especially on Strangers with Candy, a piece of brutally unflinching comedy that would never in a million years exist now. I never thought his faux-neocon bit was that funny, but I got why people liked it, and to be fair, I'd left the world of cable TV by then.
Fast forward to today: Colbert is pouring out literal (crocodile) tears on cue about how bad Trump is - and more tears about how great Biden is. I've tried to watch a couple of bits, and he is not even attempting something resembling comedy at this point. You could move his show to MSNBC without changing the format one iota. Something tells me that this is all a preamble to his inevitable entry into boring, middle-of-the-road, politics of the NIMBY-authoritarian variety. (Get ready for the Maddow/Colbert presidential ticket America!)
If anything about the Trump era - which seems to continue to ramp up despite his absence - infuriates me, it's the absolute destruction of comedy, art, music; seemingly all fine arts and their lower-brow media arts cousins have degenerated into a lazy commentary on the orange man (i.e., "he's bad"). Reagan and Bush had this feature too, but not to this level, and certainly not with the mainstream of the democratic party simultaneously coming out against due process (and sex in general really), free speech, objective journalism and press freedoms, intellectual inquiry, unimpeded free expression, many aspects of hard science, and honest intellectual discussion. I can't even wrap my head around it, so I'll just blame Colbert.
"the mainstream of the democratic party simultaneously coming out against due process (and sex in general really)"
What's with the new-(ish) puritanism? Now the media messaging says sex is something that requires a corporate mediator, not something two people do together consensually because they like each other.
I don't know that I fully understand it, but I'll take a swing: this behavior was all already in the air on college campuses, but had spilled out to the most liberal enclaves of the big cities and art spaces pre-Trump (and I happened to be in both of those things, so I got to see it up close early). It was readily adopted by the mainstream of the democratic party as a presumed way to take down Trump. It failed miserably, but they are unable to put the genie back in the bottle. See: the way they used these ideas of anti-due process to take down Franken in hopes of getting to Trump, but are now calling for due process for Cuomo.
I honestly think (or maybe just hope) that some of the earlier proponents of some of this ideology were really doing it because they truly thought it was right and just, but the media and governmental apparatchiks who adopted it were only interested in using it as way to gather power. "We may destablize and destroy the very fabric of this country, but at least we got, uh, Joe Biden elected!"
It's been fashionable to trash Woody Allen for a few decades, but I argue that you can't effectively satirize a degenerate society without having participated in it.
I liked Allen's earlier films quite a bit as a young student of filmmaking, but I haven't watched one of his recent films in at least 15 years, and I find his wild neuroses and narcissism difficult to deal with at this point. (I will still stand by Sleeper, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose and a number of his really funny and non-Bergman-aping films from that period.)
That said, the dissonance required to will yourself into thinking that the whole Woody/Mia/Ronan/Dylan/Sinatra/Andre Previn/Moses/Soon-Yi affair is cut-and-dry, and that a bunch of one-sided newspaper stories or a high-budget one-sided documentary constitutes some sort of "evidence" is an amazing, troubling amount of dissonance. Nobody - except Woody Allen I'd gather - knows the truth about this. After a couple of state-sponsored investigations decided to not charge him, I'd have to say that people should give him the benefit of the doubt, even if he's most likely a deeply weird man.
I'd highly suggest reading Joann Wypijewski's writings about the Allen affair, as well as her writings about MeToo in general. Wypijewski is brilliant, blissfully offline, and she can weave all of the interconnected issues of this moment together skillfully, in a way that makes you think that literally everyone else lost critical thinking skills on the subject. Her long and piercing essay "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About MeToo" from the Nation, is available online, although it's been expanded into a book now. Her duo of Allen pieces from the last couple of years are likewise definitive.
A couple of years back, when the Woody Allen moral panic was really ramping up, there was a young student (theater, I think) who was trying to get a Woody Allen class on her campus pulled. (Without Googling, I want to say this was California or Arizona somewhere?) I followed the story fairly closely, and her constant comments about how she lost to free speech, and how free speech is dangerous, and how free speech is the enemy, and her sort of chilling demeanor in general, was probably the moment when I really felt that our entire culture was fucked.
I loved him on the early Daily Show and especially on Strangers with Candy, a piece of brutally unflinching comedy that would never in a million years exist now. I never thought his faux-neocon bit was that funny, but I got why people liked it, and to be fair, I'd left the world of cable TV by then.
Fast forward to today: Colbert is pouring out literal (crocodile) tears on cue about how bad Trump is - and more tears about how great Biden is. I've tried to watch a couple of bits, and he is not even attempting something resembling comedy at this point. You could move his show to MSNBC without changing the format one iota. Something tells me that this is all a preamble to his inevitable entry into boring, middle-of-the-road, politics of the NIMBY-authoritarian variety. (Get ready for the Maddow/Colbert presidential ticket America!)
If anything about the Trump era - which seems to continue to ramp up despite his absence - infuriates me, it's the absolute destruction of comedy, art, music; seemingly all fine arts and their lower-brow media arts cousins have degenerated into a lazy commentary on the orange man (i.e., "he's bad"). Reagan and Bush had this feature too, but not to this level, and certainly not with the mainstream of the democratic party simultaneously coming out against due process (and sex in general really), free speech, objective journalism and press freedoms, intellectual inquiry, unimpeded free expression, many aspects of hard science, and honest intellectual discussion. I can't even wrap my head around it, so I'll just blame Colbert.
"the mainstream of the democratic party simultaneously coming out against due process (and sex in general really)"
What's with the new-(ish) puritanism? Now the media messaging says sex is something that requires a corporate mediator, not something two people do together consensually because they like each other.
I don't know that I fully understand it, but I'll take a swing: this behavior was all already in the air on college campuses, but had spilled out to the most liberal enclaves of the big cities and art spaces pre-Trump (and I happened to be in both of those things, so I got to see it up close early). It was readily adopted by the mainstream of the democratic party as a presumed way to take down Trump. It failed miserably, but they are unable to put the genie back in the bottle. See: the way they used these ideas of anti-due process to take down Franken in hopes of getting to Trump, but are now calling for due process for Cuomo.
I honestly think (or maybe just hope) that some of the earlier proponents of some of this ideology were really doing it because they truly thought it was right and just, but the media and governmental apparatchiks who adopted it were only interested in using it as way to gather power. "We may destablize and destroy the very fabric of this country, but at least we got, uh, Joe Biden elected!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80UQWWUIYs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oDEe2PNsJU
It's been fashionable to trash Woody Allen for a few decades, but I argue that you can't effectively satirize a degenerate society without having participated in it.
I liked Allen's earlier films quite a bit as a young student of filmmaking, but I haven't watched one of his recent films in at least 15 years, and I find his wild neuroses and narcissism difficult to deal with at this point. (I will still stand by Sleeper, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose and a number of his really funny and non-Bergman-aping films from that period.)
That said, the dissonance required to will yourself into thinking that the whole Woody/Mia/Ronan/Dylan/Sinatra/Andre Previn/Moses/Soon-Yi affair is cut-and-dry, and that a bunch of one-sided newspaper stories or a high-budget one-sided documentary constitutes some sort of "evidence" is an amazing, troubling amount of dissonance. Nobody - except Woody Allen I'd gather - knows the truth about this. After a couple of state-sponsored investigations decided to not charge him, I'd have to say that people should give him the benefit of the doubt, even if he's most likely a deeply weird man.
I'd highly suggest reading Joann Wypijewski's writings about the Allen affair, as well as her writings about MeToo in general. Wypijewski is brilliant, blissfully offline, and she can weave all of the interconnected issues of this moment together skillfully, in a way that makes you think that literally everyone else lost critical thinking skills on the subject. Her long and piercing essay "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About MeToo" from the Nation, is available online, although it's been expanded into a book now. Her duo of Allen pieces from the last couple of years are likewise definitive.
A couple of years back, when the Woody Allen moral panic was really ramping up, there was a young student (theater, I think) who was trying to get a Woody Allen class on her campus pulled. (Without Googling, I want to say this was California or Arizona somewhere?) I followed the story fairly closely, and her constant comments about how she lost to free speech, and how free speech is dangerous, and how free speech is the enemy, and her sort of chilling demeanor in general, was probably the moment when I really felt that our entire culture was fucked.