Woody Allen will no longer comment on the sexual abuse allegations made by Dylan Farrow, but that doesn’t mean everyone else has moved on to other things. Which can leave us all a little unsure about referencing his decades of influential work. “Jane the Virgin” took that reality on during Monday’s episode when the narrator started the show like so: “There’s an old Woody Allen quote: ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.’ And though I have complicated feelings about Woody Allen, post Soon-Yi, it’s still a very wise quote.”
The narrator isn’t alone in those complicated feelings. “It’s really hard for me. And I think that girls have such close connections with their fathers, and I did — I was a total daddy’s girl, and have mountains of daddy issues. And he feels like my film dad that I’ve been let down by,” director Leslye Headland told BuzzFeed last month. “You know what I mean? He will always permeate my work. There’s no bigger fan than me. But it’s disappointing.”
In a bit of television synchronicity, this week’s “Girls” episode also nodded to the same conundrum about Allen in a conversation between Jessa and Hannah. “The heart wants what the heart wants,” Jessa says, referencing an interview Allen did about his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn. “You do know who you’re quoting, right?” Hannah replies incredulously. (To be fair, Jessa could have thought she was quoting Emily Dickinson or Selena Gomez instead.)
“I’m not gonna indict the work,” “Girls” creator and star Lena Dunham said about Allen in an interview last year. “I think that you can decide that you don’t want to support the work of somebody who has molested a child. That’s a completely appropriate choice.”
Maybe we don’t need the eggs after all.