As if the shock and moral outrage over Woody Allen’s entire existence couldn’t possibly intensify, the very woman within the eye of the storm, watching the tumultuousness from within the confines of her safe Upper Manhattan apartment all these decades, has further added flames to a fire she seemed to be trying to help put out by, at last, speaking on her bizarre love triangle with Woody and Mia, the latter of which has often been depicted with the psycho bitch trope–only to be further corroborated in Soon-Yi’s rehashing of her childhood with such tidbits as, “I wish she had taught me how to put on makeup. I don’t know how to do any of that stuff. Mia never taught me how to use a tampon, and my babysitter got me my first bra.”
Despite a lack of conventional feminine wiles, nonetheless, Allen clearly took a shine to her, seeing in the manner in which Mia’s coldness toward her was transforming Soon-Yi into the very thing Mia did not want her to be: socially awkward and insecure. Incidentally, these are the very two qualities that Allen built his career on. So perhaps seeing something of a kindred (creepy though it may be), and after several years as a fixture of “the Farrow family,” he showed her sympathy upon recognizing that she had broken her ankle one day while playing soccer as a junior in high school (yes, Manhattan was clearly a prophecy), insisting upon taking her to the doctor–an act that served to dismantle Soon-Yi’s walls against him for she, too, assumed he must be evil and missing an emotional mechanism key to feeling in the same way she perceived Mia to be. It was after this that the nature of their relationship shifted, with Allen taking Soon-Yi to Knicks games regularly–and tragically at the encouragement of Mia.
The deepness of their dynamic persisted without turning sexual just yet as Soon-Yi advanced to college. As she recalled to New York Magazine, “We talked quite a bit and to the best of my memory I came in from college on some holiday and he showed me a Bergman movie, which I believe was The Seventh Seal, but I’m not positive. We chatted about it, and I must have been impressive because he kissed me and I think that started it.” So yes, Allen pulled a stock move out of his back pocket to get the (chess) game going–everyone fully aware that his lifelong Bergman obsession meant this was not the first time The Seventh Seal was shown to a girl for “romantic” cachet purposes. Paired with this light aggressiveness of taking the initiative to kiss her, Soon-Yi was down the rabbit hole–for whenever someone starved for affection (both emotional and physical) gets a taste of it, she’s a goner when it comes to resisting the semi heteronormative male that comes along. So it was for Soon-Yi, who often times sounds more like a rescue animal in the way she describes Allen as “a chance for someone showing me affection and being nice to me, so of course I was thrilled and ran for it. I’d be a moron and an idiot…if I’d stayed with Mia. I wasn’t the one who went after Woody—where would I get the nerve? He pursued me. That’s why the relationship has worked: I felt valued. It’s quite flattering for me.”
And then perhaps, after feeling such value (as a homemaker, that dirty word), years spent living with Allen have turned her only further into his ultimate wet dream, like a rogue, iconoclast “femme fatale” out of one of his movies, making such statements as, “I could definitely have children but I was never interested. I find it the height of vanity and very egocentric. I don’t need kids out there who have similar traits to me and look similar to me and Woody. Why is one’s DNA so special? Why would one keep on breeding when there are so many kids out there who need a loving home?” It’s almost as though having Allen as a great influencer–the only influencer, other than Mia (who served as that counter-influencer, driving her to do the exact opposite of what Mia would do), has, in effect, turned them into that cheesy wedding invitation saying, “One heart, one mind.”
The quality that shines through the most throughout Soon-Yi’s foray into the past and the events that led up to her and Woody’s now twenty-seven year relationship (the two eventually married in 1997) is that she, in essence, just needed and wanted someone–anyone, clearly–to pursue her. To make her feel like she wasn’t an ugly, worthless “retard,” as Mia allegedly liked to refer to her as a means to incite her to not be so learning disabled, apparently.
Daphne Merkin, the writer who had the chance to unlock the key to Soon-Yi’s mind, notes, “Unlike her husband, however, who famously decreed, borrowing a line from what he tells me is a short story of Saul Bellow’s (it’s actually a line from a letter by Emily Dickinson) [nice that Merkin should belittlingly correct him in print this way in the same fashion a man would do to a woman], that ‘the heart wants what it wants,’ Soon-Yi characterizes their affair as ‘a moral dilemma.’ While she says it was clear that things were over between Woody and Mia, it was still ‘a huge betrayal on both our parts, a terrible thing to do, a terrible shock to inflict on her.'” In this regard, it was almost as though a subconscious wish on Soon-Yi’s part to give back to Woody in some way for his affections by playing out a plot he couldn’t even make up for one of his movies. And yes, there had to be just an ever so slight motivation to pay back Mia in some way for her years of psychological warfare. This much is evident when Soon-Yi remarks, “[Woody’s] usually a meek person, and he took a big leap.” So there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth: pursuit. That’s all it takes to wear down a girl seeking validation’s defenses. Someone seeking external approval (typically always stemming from the kind they couldn’t get from their own parent or parents in their youth) is easily finagled, if honed in on by a person that knows what to do with that intelligence.
In contrast, “pursuit” was not much of a factor in the events leading up to the Allen and Farrow relationship. The two met in passing at a party post-Annie Hall, where she somewhat foolishly paid him a compliment about Manhattan. One could argue, then, that Farrow played the role of pursuer in this instance, but the two were formally introduced by Michael Caine (so weirdly, he’s to blame for all of this) at Elaine’s during Farrow’s run in a production called Romantic Comedy (again, you can’t make this shit up).
From there, Allen invited most of New York to his New Year’s Eve party, Farrow among the guests. Then finally, as told through The New York Times in 1991, “In the spring of 1980, he invited Farrow, again through his secretary, to lunch at Lutece. More dinner invitations followed, always through Allen’s secretary. During the first several months of this routine, Allen never phoned Farrow. He prefers not to speak on the phone to anyone unless he has to, and being invited through an intermediary didn’t bother her. ‘She never mentioned it,’ Allen says.” But in truth, it was likely somewhat vexing to a woman of Farrow’s background–the daughter of Hollywood elite Maureen O’Sullivan and John Farrow–likely expecting to be courted with more overtness. As Farrow put it in ’91, “It was a slow courtship. We would have dinner…and we’re still having dinner.”
Farrow’s macabre sense of sentimentality would be “sweet” at first in her tracking of the progress of the relationship, like when she “later made a needlepoint sampler of the date [they first went out]–April 17, 1980–that hangs on the wall outside his bedroom.” Later, that form of schmaltz would transcend into something utterly eerie.
To be more specific, Merkin beautifully describes in her Soon-Yi profile, “On Valentine’s Day 1992, Farrow sent Allen an elaborately gothic collage, in which she’d pasted a family photo on a flower-encrusted, gilded heart and then stuck skewers through the hearts of the images of the children and a real knife through her own heart.” If this isn’t a testament to the Greek-Bergmanian farce-drama Allen has explored and been attracted to his entire career, then nothing is. That said, just as pursuit can be a fortifying source for a woman’s “blossoming,” so, too, can rejection be the K.O. to her entire psyche, self-confidence and sense of rational behavior. Not that we should necessarily place so much emphasis on the power of men to control. Especially one so “demure” as Allen.
