No male artist seems to have emerged wiser or happier from the sex wars that began in the 70s and continue, sporadically, today. The buckshot lodged in their hides still smarts. Norman Mailer, whose fictional heroes bent women like pretzels and who answered his feminist critics in The Prisoner of Sex by hanging Kate Millett out to dry, grumps in interviews about how these harpies have poisoned the culture. Philip Roth—branded a misogynist even before his former wife Claire Bloom depicted him as a cad and a Svengali in her dozy memoir Leaving a Doll’s House—continues to churn his hostilities and grievances through the blender (most recently in his novel I Married a Communist). The results can be hilarious, but his anger seems real, gnawing, not just exaggerated for effect. Even John Updike, a much cooler customer, vents a certain testiness in his recent novels, tweaking the nipples of his feminist hanging jury with acrid descriptions of body parts and caustic one-liners. Perhaps the artist who has curdled the most, however, is Woody Allen. He enjoyed a free ride in the 70s, back when feminists were beginning to catch on to Mailer and company, only to be chased by a lynch mob waving microphones in the 90s. The romance with and subsequent marriage to Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi, the tumultuous breakup with Farrow and her tell-all book, the accusations of child molestation and dirty Polaroids, and the media wilding that all of this unleashed (including merciless op-ed columns by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times) have left him feeling beleaguered, defensive, and embittered, if his latest work is reliable evidence. Mighty Aphrodite, Everyone Says I Love You, Deconstructing Harry, and, now, Celebrity, have a raggedy construction, a choppy rhythm, and an obscene bluster (“Beth Kramer’s an aggressive, tight-ass, busybody cunt, and it’s none of her fucking business how I speak to my son”—Deconstructing Harry). His rooting section—his chief cheerleader, the New York Times cultural desk—chalks these films up to a loosey-goosey liberation from narrative constraints and audience expectations (an old pro letting go), but audiences have tended to recoil. This unzipped lip doesn’t represent the Woody they once loved.

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It’s difficult to recall the honeymoon period when Allen was considered a cuddly mascot, the thinking woman’s huggy-bear. Like Phil Donahue and Alan Alda, fellow paragons of post–John Wayne manhood, he was quick on the verbal draw and amiably slouchy. He specialized in cajolery and neurosis-juggling. True, he did partake of poppin’-fresh flesh in Manhattan, in which Mariel Hemingway played the world’s first Amazon nymphet, but most of the female characters in his films were responsive, animated, smart, skittish, ardent grown-ups—former English majors from whom the poetry hadn’t yet worn off. Their words carried a quiver of lyricism. His men and women may have gotten on each other’s nerves, but their anxieties were equally matched; they clung to the same psychiatrist’s couch—the Jewish lifeboat. Since Mighty Aphrodite, however, the balance of sexual power has shifted. Now when a woman opens her mouth in a Woody Allen movie, it isn’t because speech is required. As Allen’s movies have gotten pornier, oral sex has become the favored way to keep women quiet and occupied. In Deconstructing Harry, Julia Louis-Dreyfus sinks to her knees before a dried-apple Richard Benjamin, who, after chiding her for using her teeth, says, “C’mon, open wide”—the first of the film’s several blowjob scenes. In Allen’s new movie, Celebrity, which premiered at the 36th New York Film Festival and reaches theaters nationwide this month, a movie star (Melanie Griffith) bestows her mouth on a grateful reporter (Kenneth Branagh), claiming that her body belongs to her husband but from the neck up she’s fancy-free. That’s become the feminine ideal in Woody Allen films—the bobbing-head doll.

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Increasingly, the women in his movies can be divided between menopausal nuts and coltish sluts. The type of lyrical kook Diane Keaton played in Annie Hall has lost her cheek-boned shine and is withering into premature hagdom, her thrift-shop wardrobe destined to become bag-lady rags and her hair shot to hell. Bristling with anger and unresolved issues, these biological time bombs cradle themselves as they walk, as if trying to contain their own destructive force. One of the rude shocks in Deconstructing Harry is seeing how unattractively lit and drearily costumed most of the women are, save for Elisabeth Shue, the film’s designated shiksa and emanator of blond rays. They’re Jewish-shrewish horrors drawn from Philip Roth’s filing cabinet. Kirstie Alley, who plays a woman wronged with thick sobs of hysteria, is a chunkier version of Bea Arthur in Maude, Demi Moore is a castration complex come to life, and Judy Davis, as another victim of Harry’s infidelity, resembles something torn up by the roots, to borrow a phrase from P. G. Wodehouse.

Woody Allen has schizzed off into an odd combination of sexual swinger and cultural prig.

Davis fares even worse in Celebrity. As the ex-wife of a hapless journalist played by Kenneth Branagh, Davis picks and pecks at herself, her sulky head protruding from a teeming anthill of mannerisms. A fearless and feared actress who dared to belittle David Lean on the set of A Passage to India when she was still a relative newcomer, Davis has squandered the lioness potential shown in her early work and devolved into a caricature of bug-eyed bitchery. Simmering in Husbands and Wives, boiling in Deconstructing Harry, she is a veritable triathlete of angst in Celebrity, projecting a neediness that could warp gravitational fields. One of the film’s cognitive dissonances is that her scatterbrain ineptitudes (bungling her job; having a panic attack when she spots her ex-husband and falling on all fours, pretending to hunt for an earring) are meant to be cute, endearing—bits of screwball comedy. To please her TV-producer boyfriend (Joe Mantegna, giving his roguish eye a workout), she consults a call girl played by Bebe Neuwirth about tricks of the trade regarding oral sex. It’s reminiscent of a similar tutorial in Fast Times at Ridgemont High involving Phoebe Cates and Jennifer Jason Leigh, without the charm or ease. Practicing on a banana, Davis bites down hard (men in the screening-room audience winced in unison); demonstrating the proper technique, Neuwirth pulls back the peel, slides her mouth over the banana—and then, eyes signaling trouble, begins to gag as a broken-off piece lodges in her throat. Davis has to perform a typically frantic Heimlich maneuver to free it. Meanwhile, I sat there thinking, So it’s come to this.

Some critics have deplored this scene as pandering to the cynicism and voyeurism of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. I think the political overtones are simply happenstance. The oral fixation in Allen’s films pre-dates the presidential kneepads. It’s part of the larger, familiar passive aggression. Aside from whining, the Woody Man has never exerted himself much. Getting head not only liberates him from making any actual effort of his own but allows him to remain lazily detached—to tune out the woman on his lap and holster his precious thoughts. (Not that there are any great brain waves coursing through the screenplay of Celebrity, which features clunkers such as “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, or, more accurately, for whom the toilet flushes.”) The aggressive half of passive aggression is expressed in finky acts of infidelity which the Woody Man pretends “just happened.” After Branagh’s Lee Simon has set up house with Famke Janssen’s Bonnie, the sexiest, poutiest book editor since Suzanne Pleshette in Youngblood Hawke, he lies about going to the all-night drugstore for ulcer medicine in order to meet Winona Ryder—it doesn’t matter what her character’s name is, since her role seems made up as it goes along. (She’s a movie extra and a waitress who moonlights as the translator and companion of a Nobel scientist—a Renaissance waif.) They kiss, and this foolish romantic whim ends up wrecking his relationship. “The heart wants what it wants,” Allen famously remarked during the height of the Soon-Yi scandal, which is a mantra for shirking responsibility for one’s actions—for pretending one is gripped by a higher power, like an alien abductee lifted by the light.

Allen is preaching the Marx Brothers to audiences clued in to the Farrelly Brothers.

Whenever a Woody Man is cornered and asked to own up to his feelings or behavior, instant disavowal kicks in, as he waves his arms and sputters in broken sentences. Vagueness is his preferred avoidance technique—his verbal aikido. He tries to toss the women off-balance with the force of their accusations: when Mia Farrow asks Michael Caine in Hannah and Her Sisters whether he’s disenchanted with their marriage or in love with someone else (he is), he snaps, “My God, what is this, the Gestapo?” Pressed further, a Woody Man gaslights his wife or girlfriend, making her feel her suspicions are paranoid figments of imagination. “What are you, crazy?” may be the most oft asked question in the Woody Allen oeuvre. Being treated as crazy eventually makes the women crazy. There’s nothing like being lied to to make you lose it. One glass of red wine and these divorcees are ready for combat.

So much for the nuts.

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The sluts are all trim physique and no psyche, young yet lacking any higher yearning, too narcissistic to have outside interests or questions to ask. In the past, Allen would mentor the child-women in the films, give them recommendation lists intended to nurture their tender taste buds. The sex was part of a larger instruction, the student-teacher relationship being inherently erotic, according to some academic theorists. This cultural pretense—this cover story—has been pretty much dropped. The molding and marriage of like minds has been replaced by the collision of pure flesh. In Celebrity, Charlize Theron plays a model who strides like an upright puma and describes herself as polymorphously perverse; she oozes at the slightest touch. Inexplicably, this wonder honey fastens on Branagh’s Lee, who drives an Aston Martin, pretty flash wheels for an aging Josh Freelantzovitz; in the car, her tongue invades his ear like a wet snake (when she asks if he’s afraid of catching her germs, he replies, “From you, I’d be willing to catch terminal cancer”).

The mercenary beauties Celebrity seems to be stockpiling for a nuclear winter represent the high-maintenance end of Allen’s prostitute fixation. Since showcasing Mira Sorvino as a hooker with a heart of gold and a Judy Holliday voice in Mighty Aphrodite, he has shifted from comic sentimentality into a more low-down appreciation of amateur nymphos and professional whores. Unlike civilian women, with all their needs and entanglements, these passing fancies have an emotional off switch. The most capable of them provide a tidy service. You pop, you pay, they go, as Woody explains to his shrink in Deconstructing Harry. Moreover, they don’t wear you out with lots of cultural shoptalk. “You don’t have to discuss Proust or films,” he explains. In Woodyland, literary name-dropping is man’s work, dammit—the Eurotrash groupie in Celebrity who mentions Chekhov’s name after sex is meant to be regarded as a shallow dip.

The primary hooker in Deconstructing Harry was played by a black actress (Hazelle Goodman), a casting decision which was perceived by some as a sly “take that” from Allen. For years, he had been criticized for portraying Manhattan as a strictly white upscale wonderland, populated exclusively by psychoanalyzed Jews and lustrous shiksas. Now, after two decades of pretending people of color didn’t exist (aside from Bobby Short at the piano), he finally inserts a major black character into one of his films, and what is she? Superfly’s mama. When Allen’s Harry asks Cookie if she knows what a black hole is, she says, “Yeah, that’s how I make my livin’.” After she (implausibly) accompanies him to an awards ceremony at his alma mater, they’re both thrown into the clink; later, he’s bailed out, but she’s never mentioned. Her fate means nothing to the film, or the filmmaker—it’s as if she were not even a person.

A charitable reading would chalk up Cookie’s foxy-mama cartoonishness as part of the film’s tactical assault on political correctness. After all, Allen didn’t hesitate to ruffle fellow Jews: when Eric Bogosian’s Orthodox character asks Harry if he believes in the Holocaust, he replies, “Not only do I know that we lost six million, but the scary thing is that records are made to be broken.” With Celebrity, however, the use of the black characters is too consistently coarse and lowbrow to be rationalized away. Whether it’s Branagh stammering to basketball star Anthony Mason, “You must have a huge ... following,” or a minor Italian-American character, in a cringe-inducing compliment, remarking how “cheerful” all black folks are, the movie carries a racist tinge. It’s as if Allen can’t conceive of black characters as anything other than (sexual) athletes or entertainers. He’s dangerously close to Norman Mailer’s notion in “The White Negro∏ that black people have a natural lock on physical prowess—a primitive advantage. The jungle-fever gyration Mason does on the dance floor with Theron hypnotizes Allen’s camera maybe more than it ought.

As he’s gotten older, Woody Allen has schizzed off into an odd combination of sexual swinger and cultural prig. Not that his cultural tastes haven’t always been on the fogyish side. In a famous monologue in Manhattan, he enters into his tape recorder his honor roll of things which make life worth living, which include the second movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong, Swedish films, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Cezanne’s apples, Frank Sinatra, and Marlon Brando. Note: Louis Armstrong, but not Charlie Parker; Cezanne, but not any of the Abstract Expressionists. It reveals a cutoff point in Allen’s consciousness after which no other influences seem to have entered. “Tradition is the illusion of permanence,” Woody says about religion in Deconstructing Harry, but it’s a nifty line that may apply to culture as well. Cinematically, his enthusiasms haven’t advanced beyond the art-house favorites of the 50s and 60s: Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, Godard (those jump cuts in Husbands and Wives and the opening of Deconstructing Harry). Musically, his soundtracks have the faded oomph of old gramophone records. Comedically, he remains loyal to the Marx Brothers (especially Groucho—he wore a Groucho mask in homage in Everyone Says I Love You), whose tumult of slapstick and wordplay is his touchstone for a redeeming kind of crazy sanity. In Hannah and Her Sisters, the Woody character, moping after a medical misdiagnosis plunged him into a funk over death and the meaninglessness of existence, has his spirits restored when he pops into Duck Soup at a revival house and is able to laugh again, much as Joel McCrea becomes one with his fellowman in Sullivan’s Travels as they hoot at a Mickey Mouse cartoon. It’s a sweet gesture but a sentimental cop-out—when you’re depressed, Marx Brothers humor sounds as hollow as anything else—and shows how desperately he clings to his old tastes, afraid to let go or move ahead.

“What are you, crazy?” may be the most oft asked question in the Woody Allen oeuvre.

Unfortunately, the movie world has moved ahead without him. Allen is preaching the Marx Brothers to audiences clued in to the Farrelly Brothers. Allen’s heavy intentions don’t fly in this period of lighter gravity. Faithfully invoking the Modern Library demigods of modernism who shaped his intellectual development (Proust, Flaubert, Kafka), he’s quixotically upholding the image of the artist as the tortured minister of his own complex sensibility in a postmodern culture which is characterized by sampling, pastiche, and multiple scenarios that don’t require a single auteur. More than any other performer, he made the standup-comic persona a pacing novelistic presence on the screen—a focal point of social observation. His best films were X-rays of the Zeitgeist at the time and are valuable time capsules now. Indeed, his comedies form one of the main bridges between modernism and postmodernism, linking the bookish neurosis and absurdism of the bohemian 50s and 60s (Freud, Jules Feiffer, Mort Sahl, Nichols and May) to the flippant, noncommittal, nonintrospective, free-floating irony of the yuppie ascendancy (in a word, Seinfeld). Without Woody Allen, no George Costanza. Without Annie Hall, no Ally McBeal. For that matter, without Zelig, no Forrest Gump.

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Being able to make movies for decades with minimal interference is a privilege that has allowed Allen to write, cast, direct, and edit without being nitpicked to death by focus groups and studio executives. This elbowroom has enabled him to invent an inspired newsreel collage such as Zelig, experiment with a German Expressionist allegory such as Shadows and Fog, produce a Dennis Potter–like musical such as Everyone Says I Love You, even completely reshoot a maudlin sleepwalker such as September (another one of Allen’s Chekhovian pressings of autumn leaves), and yet make each foray a personal marker in his own artistic pilgrimage. His films never have the tin stamp of Hollywood product. With their trademark white credits against a black screen, they constitute a cinematic uniform edition of Allen’s varied output. But this protected status has also made him something of a bubble boy, distorting his view of his fans—as needy gargoyles (Stardust Memories) or cheap gawkers (in Wild Man Blues, Barbara Kopple’s documentary of Allen’s European jazz tour, he laments as a fan takes his picture in Venice, “They won’t pay 10 cents to see one of my movies, but passing in a gondola, they love it”)—and sealing him off from his casts, whom he treats not as collaborators but as patchwork figures, most of whom are fed only the few pages of script they need. God forbid they should get a glimpse of the big picture, or develop their own ideas. It’s instructive that the last truly entertaining Woody Allen movie, the last one to get into gear, was 1993’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, which was co-written with Marshall Brickman (co-author of Annie Hall) and reunited Allen with Diane Keaton and Alan Alda (who was hilarious as the vain television producer in Crimes and Misdemeanors). Manhattan Murder Mystery spritzes along happily, unpretentiously, offering convincing proof that Allen needs collaborators, sidekicks, foils. Somebody—anybody—to interrupt his compulsive conversational comb-overs. (In fairness, austerity moves resulting from the meager box-office returns of Allen’s recent work have forced him to toss longtime members of his select circle from the lifeboat, including producer Robert Greenhut, editor Susan E. Morse, and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma. He also parted company with his agent, “the legendary Sam Cohn.” His security blanket has been tom to scraps.)

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In its own diddling way, Celebrity is an admission of Allen’s isolation, a study of the unbearable lightness of being a bystander at the passing scene. It’s a continuing thread in Allen’s work, this persistent sense of having missed out on the party. In Stardust Memories, Woody has a Fellini-esque scene about being stuck in a dreary train and observing passengers (including a starlet named Sharon Stone) in another car laughing and whooping it up—having the fun he wishes he were having. He’s the eternal outsider, excluded from the festivities. In Celebrity, Branagh’s Lee covets the statuesque blonde trophy-date a classmate squires to their high-school reunion. He thinks becoming a player will help him nab a better class of babe. At the end of the film, his quest for the golden fleece has been squashed. The author of two disappointing novels (and a third that was pitched into the East River by the woman he betrays), along with a screenplay (which he failed to peddle to a dissolute star played to spooky perfection by Leonardo DiCaprio, whose droogie entourage is Allen’s vision of young pagan Hollywood), Lee finds himself at the premiere of a popcorn movie called The Liquidator. Alone, bereft, artistically null, a sellout with no takers, Lee stares at the word HELP written across the Manhattan skyline on the screen—a silent cry that mirrors his existential plight. Unlike Woody in Hannah and Her Sisters and Joel McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels, Lee’s being in a movie audience—a crowd—doesn’t bring him out of himself. It bottles him up and cuts him off as he feels his own insignificance. Woody Allen isn’t the first filmmaker to mistake his own drop in morale for a larger cultural malaise (Paul Mazursky, the director of Down and Out in Beverly Hills, took a sad, satirical look at his own inability to connect with today’s thrill-happy movie audience in an exercise in futility called The Pickle), but he may be the first to try to turn it into an Everyman fable. It’s a lot to ask of a viewer, to empathize with a loser like Branagh’s Lee, that bag of mush, or to accept high-minded editorializing from a director so obviously on booty call. In a line that functions as the movie’s thesis statement, Branagh laments “a culture that took a wrong turn somewhere,” presumably in O.J.’s white Bronco. Maybe so, but Woody Allen himself is going in circles.