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It pleased me to watch\u00a0Wonder Wheel<\/em>, Woody Allen\u2019s most recent film, at one of my favorite art houses in Seoul. Though hardly an Allen devotee \u2014 I\u2019ll probably never get around to a good third of his filmography \u2014 I wouldn\u2019t have enjoyed quite the same freedom, back in America, from the expectation to interrogate the morality of my viewership. \u201cIt would make life easier if Woody Allen\u2019s movies were as easy and as right to condemn as his behavior,\u201d declares the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u2018s Richard Brody in\u00a0his own piece on the picture<\/a>. \u201cBut that\u2019s not my experience of his movies, and this makes it difficult both to watch and to write about them,\u201d as he has done, unfailingly, with \u201cconsidered queasiness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those two words also describe the feeling with which, from the other side of the Pacific, I\u2019ve watched the movement that has made, or attempted to make, Allen into a pariah, including but hardly limited to the sordid combing-through of his work (and even his\u00a0archives<\/a>) for evidence of deviant desires. It brings to mind my reaction to another American movie I watched in Korea, the still-untainted (but also less artistically respected) Cameron Crowe\u2019s\u00a0Jerry Maguire<\/em>, which I happened to catch on television not long before the floodgates of sexual-misconduct accusation opened onto Hollywood. Despite its place in the zeitgeist, I\u2019d never actually seen it before, and I found myself astonished by the distance between its depiction of American life and the reality of American life today: the 1990s it portrays looks much closer to the 1950s than the 2010s.<\/p>\n
When I brought this up to a friend who also grew up in America in that era, he pointed out the seemingly total disappearance of moral panics. Back then they\u2019d been so common, and sparked by what now look like the most trivial phenomena: violent video games, \u201cexplicit lyrics,\u201d a too-irreverent quip on the part of Bart Simpson. \u201cA moral panic is always a reaction to something that has been there all along but has evaded attention \u2014 until a particular crime captures the public imagination,\u201d\u00a0wrote Masha Gessen<\/a>, also in the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>, late last year. \u201cSex panics in the past have begun with actual crimes but led to outsize penalties and, more importantly, to a generalized sense of danger. The object of fear in America\u2019s recent sex panics is the sexual predator, a concept that took hold in the nineteen-nineties.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n