I blame Freud

I think Freud was right when he published his thought that a lot of the neurotic cases he had seen had been caused by childhood sexual abuse. However, this idea was badly received so he changed it: he said that the children wanted their parents sexually. Electra complexes, Oedipus complexes; in a nutshell, that the children were subject to sexual desires, even babies. People got him all wrong. He was talking about the unconscious.

If you fast forward to the seventies and watch Woody Allen's "Manhattan" it it clear that a grown adult (40 ish?) is in a sexual relationship with a teenager and is treating it almost as a teacher/ pupil relationship - it has always made me uncomfortable, especially the way he messes her around and tries his best to get her back at the end. Selfish or what? The guys in "Annie Hall" too, make salacious comments about young teenage girls: it shows the way it was back then. Preying on the young was becoming mainstream. Normalised. O.K. Talking about Freud all the time (the way people did) seemed to be a way of justifying - intellectualising -  something that was actually a creepy desire for forbidden (innocent, vulnerable) fruit.

I remember dancing with an 20-something adult man when I was 13 and he asked me if I was a "woman", and I said I was, although I thought it a very personal question. He asked me how I managed! He meant: How do you manage for sex? I had just had my first kiss and I was very happy. And drunk. My parents (and their friends) let us drink Martini and Lemonade, which was an early version of an alcopop. Also, Dubonnet and lemonade. All quite enough to make us tiddly. I said "oh, I manage fine", trying to keep the party happy, as girls do, and thinking about the boy who had kissed me. Lord knows what he thought I meant.

I was thinking about this because I read all the details about the Max Clifford case. Our local celebrity got eight years (will serve 4) in prison for sexual abuse. Sure he deserved it. But in 1977 it was all over the place; people talked about sex with teenage girls all the time. I am so glad the tide turned: sadly the corrosion has gone deep and the law is touching only the surface.

Better to bang up the abusers who are currently abusing rather than historical cases. I read in the paper some years ago that there are so many perverts abusing their children that the judges get bored of hearing the cases. Boredom! Boredom is not the right response.

NOTE: crossword clue in Guardian no: 26,249: In terms of habits, not getting any less anti-Freudian?

Quite a hard one and I gave up and looked up the answer: heeheegroan: shrink resistant.

Blue Jasmine

This Woody Allen film is not in the least fun. It's interesting and thoughtful, but it's bleak. There are themes: outright dishonesty is one, the murky area of being complicit in dishonesty is another, the shocking behaviour of an unfaithful husband, the anger of a betrayed wife, wealth based on fraud, the relationship between adopted siblings who really have nothing in common, the anger of a child betrayed by both parents. Emotionally it's quite exhausting.

San Francisco looks interesting; it has a completely different feel to it from New York. Cate Blanchett plays a New York woman who is completely out of her milieu, and to some extent she tries to adjust, you can feel sorry for her but at the same time you have to get annoyed with her for her lack of sensitivity to the people around her.

But the men are so much worse than the women.

Annie Hall

Last night Stan wanted us to watch a film and I refused to watch just any film - they regularly seem quite boring and I start reading halfway through. So I chose what we should watch and we watched Annie Hall.
I am rather glad that my son (20) and daughter (17) had never seen it before. They are the right age to appreciate it. They have seen plenty of comedy that echoes Annie Hall and references Annie Hall, and at last, they have seen Annie Hall.

Compared with modern films it is more compact - quite short - and doesn't repeat itself, so every line is telling. The whole relationship is shown out of sequence, so it makes the audience do the work of putting it in order, but this is not a stupidly complicated exercise as it is in 500 Days of Summer, because it is always possible to view the relationship as a whole - something that has a particular, happy tone of its own - as well as something that has a rise and fall.

Allen is at home with the idea of reducing people to cultural stereotypes - in one scene he meets a woman who remarks that he has just done exactly that - but he also wants to play with them - juxtaposing them for comic effect, and noticing the influence we have on each other when we embark on a relationship, (mainly Alvy on Annie). He also notes how the elements of common culture - such as films and sport - enable and enrich the urban mix.

Woody Allen was like a silent movie director in that he loves to explore the fun possibilities of what's possible in story-telling - cutting the screen in half or using subtitles or taking modern people back to visit a scene from the past, and he loves a bit of slapstick in the form of car crashes or strange driving. In this way a film that is all about conversation is also full of gags and surprises.

Annie talking to her shrink while Alvie talks to his.

What I like about it is that it's an unapologetically clever film that young people can aspire to - they can take a load of references away from it and try to explore them - I know I did. it made me hungry to know more, like the Annie Hall character, so she could feel more confident with the know-it-all urban men. She wanted to be more than an endearing diversion from Alvy's long-time preoccupations with death and sex. The dynamic of the relationship is about a woman growing up and away. The subtext is about education and gaining the confidence to choose your path.