“Self-insertion” is a popularly used term with no presence in any official dictionary, but many iterations in different modes of storytelling—primarily, literature. I wish I could let go of the Wikipedia definition, but it is too apt not to include as a helpful means in evaluating the ethics of the technique’s usage in the case studies I intend to compare. There, self-insertion is defined as “a literary device in which a fictional character, who represents the real author of a work of fiction, appears as an idealized character within that fiction, either overtly or in disguise.”¹ The depths of this element of disguise are, I believe, under-examined, if not unexplored. This essay will examine the ethical implications of an artist’s choice to portray their own protagonist in film and television media, focusing on Woody Allen’s portrayal of Isaac Davis in Manhattan (1979) in direct comparison to Lena Dunham’s portrayal of Hannah Horvath in Girls (2012-2017) .

Both morally murky depictions of life and love in New York City, these works became zeitgeists for their respective time periods, noted for honest characterization and, equally, subjects of ethical contention. Their protagonists evoked cultural responses that were as passionate as they were divergent, often informed by or associated with the personal lives of Dunham and Allen, who were arguably inseparable from the characters themselves. In these specific cases, are the intentions of the artists relevant to consider when evaluating the ethics of the choice to self-insert? I am interested in the nuance of disguise imbued in this choice; how the artist can play out an obviously idealized version of their life, or play to honesty to suggest their own imperfection. I would argue that Allen and Dunham both play the latter, but with profoundly different intentions. In Manhattan, Allen uses his portrayal of Isaac to contribute to a decades-long refutation of unethical and abusive age dynamics in his personal life through the grooming of his audience. He steps into his own narrative and plays its muddled ethics for the power of their canniness. It is an exercise in trust, and Allen earns ours. The question, though, is if he deserved it.

Woody Allen

Isaac sinks into the soft darkness of the frame by way of an elegant spiral staircase as sweet strings lull us into the scene. Tracy (played by Mariel Hemingway) reads with her legs splayed out across the sofa, her head resting up against her hand as she waits for her wine-donning lover to finish commenting on her former sex life—that of her early adolescence. Isaac chastises her for her sexual ventures, “You’re telling me that you’ve had three affairs before me? That’s really hard to believe. You know, it’s mind boggling, when I was your age I was still being tucked in by my grandparents.”² She writes him off, tells him that her exes were merely “immature boys” and “nothing like you.” At face value, there is potential to interpret her response as hyper-mature, her character as hyper-aware, and her sense of self as more fully developed than most girls her age—which, by the way, is seventeen. There’s no dispute that Allen, as the screenwriter, chose these words with care, and as the director, positioned her expertly in that blasé reading-for-pleasure spread on the couch. Yet, out of his control was the shrill and telling pitch of Tracy’s voice—newly pubescent at best. It is jarring to the ear, and childlike in a way that forms an antithesis to everything we think we know of her from the body language on display in the shot.

It’s not the first time Tracy speaks, but is the first time that we see her and Isaac in private. He joins her on the couch and slides his hand up her bare leg to temper her enthusiasm for him, as she admits that she believes she is in love. He warns her, “Don’t get carried away [. . .] you’re a kid, and I never want you to forget that.” He indulges her, “I want you to enjoy me [. . .] my astonishing sexual technique.” And at last, he protects her, “But never forget that you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” Allen offers us a few ways to interpret Isaac’s role in this relationship: Isaac as disciplinarian, Isaac as enamored lover, or Isaac as knowing savior. The result is a complex blend of the three—a cocktail of romanticized ethical flaws intended to communicate the very humanity that make Allen’s protagonists so attractive to his audiences.

Isaac is in over his head. He is in love or, at least, infatuated with Tracy. He’s lost in a crisis of divorce, of middle age, of loneliness. He’s a lovable, misstepping, dope, that Isaac.

Woody Allen is not.

Woody Allen is a very smart man.

He knows how to write the conversation away from the disquieting childlike innocence of Tracy, but not so much that we can’t see through it. He directs us to see Tracy as some type of rare in-between state: clearly a child, with bouts of behavior and speech that are questionably adult. Allen’s work relies on these very in-betweens, claiming ethical grays, such as a relationship between a seventeen year old and forty-two year old, in which the seventeen-year-old shows more interest (emotional, sexual, and otherwise), and, as Allen manipulates, the forty-two year old is so knocked off his feet that he couldn’t possibly be manipulating the relationship, or the child.

Not consciously, anyhow. Allen offers us ways to understand Isaac’s humanity, flawed as it may be. However, the issue lies in our willingness, or even desire, to empathize with this character: a self-aware, developed, adult man in a sexual relationship with an underage adolescent girl. It would be difficult to argue that Isaac is a man of high morals, and Allen himself would likely say the guy is comically pitiful. But being that Isaac is a fictional character, his hypothetical morals aren’t of much concern. At least, they wouldn’t be, if they didn’t align exactly with the facts of Woody Allen’s life. Manhattan is not just a push pull of sexual ethics, it is the foundation of Allen’s refutation of his own sexual misconduct: his long-standing infatuation with underage girls and the manipulation of these girls into abusive relationship dynamics. Allen tells his own story in Manhattan, framing himself in Isaac as rather powerless. No matter how many times Isaac warns Tracy, or staves her off, she just can’t get enough. She’s as hungry as he is and, seemingly, more-so. If we are ever to imagine Isaac’s creator in this type of relationship, we would see it just as Allen paints it—a complicated, bound-to-fail, thrilling kind of romance. Not manipulation, and certainly not abuse. Manhattan never asks us to question the ethics of forty-one-year old Allen’s own real-life relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl.

Ultimately, it is Allen’s choice to play the role of Isaac that makes this link between character and creator nearly irrefutable. There is a visual association that cannot be undone, and it assigns a charming nuance to Allen’s personal actions that is not warranted. He suggests his own imperfection through his identification with and portrayal of Isaac, but in doing so he asks us to accept it and move on. Inherently, this expounds a great and troubling falsehood that qualifies the work not only as unethical, but as an artistic failure, on the whole.

Lena Dunham

Dunham’s portrayal of Hannah in Girls comes from an inverse intention to Allen’s. She takes ownership of her own privileged behavior via the life of her protagonist, rather than casting out the responsibility to another person, i.e., another actress. This takes shape most prominently in season 4, episode 2,“Triggering.” It’s Hannah’s turn to share her work on her first day of class at the Iowa Writers Workshop. She is up to read a piece of original short fiction and prefaces it with a trigger warning; hence the episode’s title. As she does, students wince, blink, and shift in their seats. She doesn’t notice. She sits up straight to read aloud, with confidence. “He made choices, and I obeyed. I let him press his thumb so hard into my neck that blue marks appeared.”³ The chins in the room bend forward, eyes cast out in an empty gaze—waiting impatiently for the reading to end. Hannah puppets along with her hand for added effect, “And once his arm reared back, and his fist landed with a thud on my collarbone. Like sex, that didn’t feel like anything I thought it would.” One student slouches to bury her face in her hands. “And so it didn’t matter if I was good. In my choicelessness, I was free for a moment.” The professor cuts in, “Okay. What is this story about?” Almost too quickly, a student answers, “It’s about a really privileged girl deciding that she’s just gonna let someone abuse her.” The rest of the class follows suit in their opinions. The same student who buried her face in her hands remarks that she “was struggling not to be offended.” Hannah balks at their offense on behalf of the abused, interjects when she’s supposed to stay silent to receive feedback, and stays tellingly quiet when her fiction is called out (undeniably) as autobiographical truth.

In this scene, Dunham undermines her own work as a nonfiction writer by making her character, Hannah, the antihero of the episode. Her writing is ethically gray and considered offensive by her peers, who express their disapproval, outright. They find it written from a place of privilege with offense to survivors of abuse, and claim that it is obviously pulled from Hannah’s own sexual ventures, an aspect of the work they find both troubling and distracting.

Hannah flounders under the pressure, rejects their complaints as irrational and oversensitive, and comes out looking like an inexperienced, thin-skinned writer who doesn’t know how to take criticism. If her story wasn’t inappropriate enough to begin with, her ill-tempered defense in the classroom leads the graduate professor to eventually suggest that Hannah consider leaving the program. And, eventually, she does. Dunham writes her character into humiliation, and directs herself to squirm in the hot seat. Dunham herself has published essays that revolve around uncomfortable, sometimes sought-after, sexual encounters, and in writing this episode of Girls, she criticizes the potential for offense or flippancy in her own stories and experience through the character of Hannah. Just as Allen does with Isaac, Dunham presents a version of herself that puts her imperfections on prominent display. However, at no point does she request our ethical pardon. Instead, she holds herself accountable through the adverse reactions of the characters that surround Hannah- both in the incisive writing of their dialogue and the stone-cold direction of their behavior towards her.

She does not, as Allen does, manipulate the reactions of the fictional world to enshrine the protagonist to a position of blameless, inevitable misfortune. She does not ameliorate her flaws, but presents and understands them. On this basis, the work is founded in truth, and is therefore highly ethical.

Plato

I base my understanding of truth as art’s ethical merit on Plato’s ideas of art as imitation in book 10 of The Republic. Plato identifies tragic playwrights as “representers” who make no original contribution to the greater good of a society, but rather extraneously imitate aspects of that society. He prefers the cobbler to the poet, and God to the cobbler, proclaiming, “they’re two generations away from the throne of truth, and so are all other representers.”⁴ Plato further criticizes poets who write stories that they have not lived, causing them a fourth removal. Despite this disapproval of artists on the whole, he finds redemption in poets who avoid universality and drive home the self-specific, adding, “A good poet must understand the issues he writes about, if his writing is to be successful.”⁵ In that spirit, there is no better-known subject than the self. This is cause to consider self-insertion as a virtuous, if egocentric, means of making art. As an imitation of original experience, it stands closer to “God,” once removed rather than thrice. With Allen and Dunham writing, directing, and portraying themselves in their own narratives, they approach what could be considered as the closest filmic version of artistic truth. The ethics of their shared position, then, enter only when we consider the artists’ intentions in how they represent themselves.

When an artist makes the choice to tell their own story from a position of auteur-like creative control, they are faced with the choice of how truthfully to tell it. They have the choice to distance themself, hand off the visual associative responsibility to another willing actor, or to step into the story completely. Allen and Dunham both chose to step in, but their reasoning for doing so could not have been more different. Allen chose to manipulate the truth; Dunham chose to endure it. And in the end, the greatest ethical disappointment of these two works was not either of the artists’ choices to self-insert or their intentions in doing so, but the erroneous response of the public. This materialized as vicious public backlash toward Lena Dunham for her character in Girls, and decades of silence on the ethical issues of Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan. 

Maybe we can blame the aggressive public opinion on Girls on its release into a rampantly evolving internet culture. While social media in 2015 encouraged the individual as critic (self-critic, social critic and, subsequently, art critic), American journalism in 1979 didn’t quite create pathways for mass response on television and film. And while the sheer volume of backlash towards Girls is cause for concern, the deeper issue lies within its unflinching cruelty. It is not a baseline quantitative comparison of moral condemnations of either work, it is the tremendous disparity between them; between casual acceptance of Allen’s “moral ambiguity” and total outrage toward Dunham’s. It appears evident that this discrepancy has much to do with power, reputation, and most of all, gender.

Mary Sue

Unsurprisingly, there is an official and derogatory definition of a female version of the self- inserted character. In 1973, Paula Smith and Shannon Ferraro founded Star Trek fanzine, Menagerie, which accepted submissions for fan fiction based on the widely celebrated series that ended in 1969. They quickly noticed a common female character trope among female-authored submissions一the earliest iteration of what we now refer to as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, then一called the Mary Sue.⁶ She was an ostensibly self-inserted character, yet so idealized that she was deemed boring for her unrealistic and uninteresting perfection. Though Smith and Terraro ridiculed the flatness of these self-inserts at first, it quickly dawned on them that there exists a plethora of male Mary Sue characters in popular culture and literature一perfectly abled to an irritating extent. Yet, no one seems to question the plausibility of their perfection, and many continue to call out the Mary Sues and Manic Pixie Dream girls of fan fiction and beyond, criticizing the possibility that their creator could be as nauseatingly flawless as they are. If we, as a culture, have denounced these archetypes as posing standards for women that are far out of reach, I believe it means one of two things. Either:

1. We don’t believe that women are as capable as men.
   or
2. We have a desire to see ourselves or, if not ourselves, our women (real women, flawed women) reflected on the screen.

In the spirit of generosity, let’s call it number two. We want complicated female characters who make mistakes as often as they have triumphs, that bridge us with the artist through the ups and downs of our shared experiences. Is the character we crave not Hannah Horvath? In the years that Girls ran on HBO, the public did not seem to think so. Or, if they did, maybe we should have gone with number 1, since it doesn’t seem that we were ready to see ourselves in Hannah一out of fear, or self-rejection, I’m not entirely sure.

In a 2016 article titled “Lena Dunham Is A Monster Of Our Own Creation,” Forbes Senior Arts Contributor, Dani Di Placido, writes of Girls:

Awful was simply the way she was . . . Lena Dunham’s Hannah has few triumphs and humiliations, learns no lessons. There is no moral to behaving this way. She simply is, and continues to be, annoying.⁷

This scathing review is not only of Hannah, but of Dunham herself. Di Placido goes further: 

Lena Dunham is now out in the real world, making cringeworthy public statements, writing misguided tweets and acting very Hannah-esque . . . Is she saying these inflammatory things to get attention . . .  Or is she just simply, annoying?⁸

This review is not unique. With the release of Girls, Hannah and Dunham were attacked in turns for their privileged, “annoying,” and ignorant behavior, personified in anything from Hannah writing a story that trivialized abuse to Hannah not having a clear reason to walk around naked in her own apartment. In a reflective interview with Rolling Stone at the end of the show’s run, Dunham addresses criticism of Hannah and Girls, at large.⁹ She draws attention to the double standard, referencing male anti-hero hit television show, Breaking Bad:

People never gave us the benefit of the doubt that the show was actually a self-aware commentary on privileged white womanhood. When a guy plays an antihero, nobody’s like, “I think Bryan Cranston’s really promoting drug use.”¹⁰

The same applies to Woody Allen, however with far graver consequences. Those who have called out the inappropriate and grooming behavior of Woody Allen as enabled by his creation of Isaac, and many other characters, alike, have only done so in the past decade (and only seriously in the past handful of years since Dylan Farrow’s open letter on her dismissed allegations of sexual child abuse by then-adoptive father, Woody). In 1979, and for the decades to follow, the age gap in Manhattan was widely accepted, if not, ignored. In a 1979 review of the film, critic Roger Ebert responds in the exact way Allen, through the film, directs him to:

It wouldn’t do, you see, for the love scenes between Woody and Mariel to feel awkward or to hint at cradle-snatching or an unhealthy interest on Woody’s part in innocent young girls. But they don’t feel that way: Hemingway’s character has a certain grave intelligence, a quietly fierce pride, that, strangely enough, suggest that even at seventeen, she’s the one Woody should be thinking of.¹¹

In the first sentence, Ebert describes the “love scenes” as between “Woody and Mariel,” using both of the actors first names. But in the final sentence, he writes that “Woody should be thinking of” … “Mariel’s character.” It’s a slight yet chilling difference that blurs the line between fictional and literal to Woody’s absolving advantage. Mariel’s character, the seventeen-year-old, can’t be harmed if she’s not real, and Woody, the real man, just as so cannot harm her. This inconsequential substitution between character and actor alludes to a greater willingness to accept them as synonymous, and infers an immediate amity between Ebert and the widely-adored Allen. With decades of films, fans, and financial approval under his belt—he had already massaged the public psyche to pass off his missteps to his characters. Dunham, who was a twenty-six-year-old emerging writer and filmmaker when Girls premiered, did not have an established reputation to cushion the boldness of her choice to tell her truth一however unwanted it may have been.

Us

In these cases, it becomes clear that the intentions of the artist are critical to consider not just in the evaluation of their choice to self-insert, but in all of their ethically complex artistic choices. Even if we are to deem Allen’s work as unethical, and even if we are to bring upon him consequences that go beyond negative criticism, we must reckon with the unsettling fact of our own failure as an audience to have gone along with it all for so long. The most we can do to correct this is to stop giving Woody Allen, and artists like him, the resources, support, and encouragement to continue making unethical art. This has nothing to do with censorship, and everything to do with intention. If we have any desire for an ethical society, but view artistic subject matter as immune to ethical evaluation, then we must be diligent enough to consider the intentions of our artists’ darker choices. More importantly, we must respond—thoughtfully, equitably, and incisively even to the work of those we’ve grown accustomed to. We must see artists—especially auteurs一as self-aware, capable enough to make choices that don’t align with ours. Equally so, we must teach ourselves to trust those who we have historically questioned when they create something we don’t yet understand. If we can enlighten ourselves to the inner world of the artist or, at the very least, be inquisitive about it一then there can exist a free world for content. Then, we can bash the Mary Sues and bring on the Hannahs. Then, and only then.

1. “Self-Insertion,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, last edited January 20, 2021.
2. Manhattan, directed by Woody Allen (United Artists, 1979).
3. Girls, season 4, episode 2, “Triggering,” directed by Lena Dunham, aired January 18, 2015.
4. Plato, “The Republic, Book 10,” Aesthetics: the Classic Readings, edited by David E. Cooper (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2019), 16.
5. Plato, “The Republic, Book 10,” Aesthetics: the Classic Readings, 17.
6. Jackie Mansky, “The Women Who Coined the Term ‘Mary Sue,’”Smithsonian Institution, May 16, 2019.
7. Dani Di Placido, “Lena Dunham Is a Monster of Our Own Creation,” Forbes, September 5, 2016.
8. Di Placido, “Lena Dunham Is a Monster of Our Own Creation.”
9. Brian Hiatt,“Lena Dunham on Girls End, T-Swift, and Being Blamed for Hillary’s Loss,” Rolling Stone, June 25 2018.
10. Brian Hiatt,“Lena Dunham on Girls End, T-Swift, and Being Blamed for Hillary’s Loss,”
11. Roger Ebert, “Manhattan Movie Review & Film Summary (1979),” Rogerebert.com, republished from Movie Review & Film Summary (1979).