“Dylan & Moses” is about growing up with Mia Farrow’s children.
I’m not worried about Woody Allen. He has received an honor America only bestows upon its greatest film directors like Chaplin and Welles. We mock and exile them until they die, then we hold retrospectives and act like we loved them all along. I do worry about the Farrow kids, and for we who reside in the shadow of their trauma.
The Farrow adoptees are as much my TV family as the Drummonds of “Different Strokes” or the Keatons of “Family Ties”. Their trauma is my trauma.
The music video for “Dylan & Moses” was created by RICK WORLEY whose film “By The Way, Woody Allen Is Innocent” is the best documentary I’ve seen on the Farrow/Allen saga, and a must watch for anyone whose opinion of this story was shaped by the biased HBO hit piece from disgraced “documentarians” Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering.
We live in McCarthyite times. In hindsight, Charlie Chaplin’s trial and exile from the US were a blueprint for the anti-Communist blacklists to come. Similarly, the Farrow versus Allen case reveals the beginnings of the machinery which has come to dominate and exploit the phenomenon we currently call cancellation. The World Is Wrong podcast covered this on an episode devoted to “Wrongness”
Euphemisms aside, what we are talking about is the conflation of perversion and subversion in order to force one’s enemies into submission. The societal collateral damage that accompanies this tactic is what my song is about.
In the case of Woody Allen, the most egregious example may be the starkly unequal attention given to the experiences of Soon-Yi Previn and Moses Farrow in the re-telling of the Farrow saga (as compared to their Farrow-favored media-elevated siblings).
A few years ago I did an episode about “The Front” on The World Is Wrong podcast. My co-host was afraid to discuss Woody Allen publicly. I, on the other hand, didn’t know how we could do a show about films and film artists the world is wrong about and ignore Woody Allen, so I invited an expert in the history of the anti-Communist blacklist AARON LEONARD (The Folk Singers And The Bureau, Whole World In An Uproar) to be the guest co-host that week.
Nothing I might make up could better illustrate the continued importance of films like “The Front”, or the McCarthyite nature of the campaign against Woody Allen than my co-host feeling intimidated out of discussing this film for fear of being declared deviant by association in a way that might hurt his directing career. It’s a testament to my co-host’s courage that, in a later episode of the show, he was willing to openly discuss “Deconstructing Harry”.
“Deconstructing Harry” is one of my favorite Woody Allen films. It was produced after Mia Farrow’s campaign of vengeance and you can feel it. Allen writes some hilariously angry dialogue for Judy Davis, Kirstie Alley, Demi Moore and Mariel Hemingway, all aimed at his character (who may be based on Philip Roth). Allen makes no attempt to present himself as some sort of sympathetic figure (the way a guilty person might). Instead, he does the artistically interesting thing and makes a film that says, “I am innocent of what I am accused but I am far from innocent. Here, let me show you how”.
While Allen continues to de-construct (and de-code?) himself, Farrow has chosen to construct elaborate walls of projection. What is the difference? The target. Both Farrow and Allen are aiming at Allen.
For the 100th episode of The World Is Wrong podcast I spoke with MARILYN MOSS, the author of “The Farrows of Hollywood: Their Dark Side of Paradise” a newly published biography of Mia’s father, John Farrow. The Farrow patriarch was a brilliant writer and director of noir films and, by all accounts, a brutally abusive person, which may help us understand Mia Farrow and the trauma she embodies.
My commitment to this song has confused my loved ones and confounded my colleagues.
When I introduce it onstage I often say,
“This song is free for you but it cost me a A LOT…”
Friends, Money. Reputation.
I hope you’ll check it out in context on my album “Recognize, De-escalate & De-code“.