Woody Allen: Nowadays, Yale Kids and 'Churchgoing Barbarians' Enjoy The Same Dumb Movies
Woody Allen doesn't get the kids today. Or, rather, he gets them, he just doesn't see that much value in their taste level. The prolific filmmaker sat down with New York magazine recently, for their 40th Anniversary issue, to discuss the changing city—and, you know, how it relates to the changing world, etc, etc, navel-gaze, navel-gaze. Basically he thinks culture has "coarsened," as evidenced by good smart kids, from schools like Yale and Columbia, who don't understand Fellini:
NY: Do you have a theory about why the culture keeps getting coarser? WA: The country has, over the years, moved to the right. And it’s possible that accompanying that move to the right, you also get a lessening of taste. But I don’t know if what I’m saying is true, because I have shown some very good films—Bergman, Fellini—to kids from good schools like Yale. Bright kids. And they were not impressed. You know, it wasn’t as though I picked out some kid from the Midwest who’s a churchgoing barbarian. Those same kids that you see in the movie house doubled over with laughter over fraternity toilet jokes are very often kids from Columbia and Yale. We might also still be feeling the fallout from the sexual revolution, when everybody just ran amok talking dirty and doing things that were forbidden and it became the mark of drama and comedy to be simply outrageous. Not necessarily dramatically interesting or particularly comic, but just outrageous.
I'm not saying I agree—because that would be pretentious—but... sigh.