Allen’s choice in women, from Mia Farrow to Louise Lasser to Diane Keaton, seem to all have a girl-ish quality, in appearance, as well as their voices. When sexy confident women are introduced in his films, they’re dangerous, and murderous,(Anjelica Huston in Crimes and Misdemeanors, for example.)

It’s funny that he resents the audience searching for his real identity; I never thought he was trying to hide. With regard to what his mother must have been like,(or how he perceived her to be,) I assume the character in his short film, Oedipus Wrecks, was his way of working out how much better his life would be without his mother around, but of course, he could very well have just been satirizing the archetypal Jewish Mother that audiences love to laugh at, and not necessarily with. I recall a line in a movie of his where he sees a woman he really wants to dance with and he quips that he “would sell his mother to the Philistines for a dance with her.” Any basic understanding of Jewish history reveals the cruelty and the anger behind that remark.

Having said all of that, I adore Woody Allen movies, for their immature romances, (I,too, do not recall the latency period that Freud claimed exists,) the nostalgia for not only the past but of past loves.

You have an amazing blog, Clare.