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BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | ALMOST NOBODY WAS a bigger Woody Allen fan than I was, and I guess that was the problem. Relationships that intense -- obsessive love affairs, cults, idol worship -- generally end badly, and the survivors bear scars that may fade with time but never really heal. Those analogies may sound melodramatic, but that's about how it is for me (and, I imagine, many of my fellow Woodyphiles) now that "Deconstructing Harry" has demonstrated what I was beginning to realize but didn't want to admit to myself: Woody Allen doesn't want me anymore. Increasingly imprisoned by his own narcissism, xenophobia and fear of death, Allen has now convincingly scattered his remaining disciples at one stroke, like a misanthropic Prospero breaking his staff. "Deconstructing Harry" is a fever dream about an aging, grasping, neurotic artist who brings his disastrous personal life, thinly veiled, into his work and ends up as a grotesque caricature of himself, alienating everyone who ever loved him. Ritual assertions that Harry Block is not Woody Allen aside, the message from the filmmaker to his fans is unmistakable: He'll make more movies, cash his checks, go to Knicks games and grow old without us; we'll have to find other heroes or none at all. I don't mean that Allen's new movie, his 26th feature as a director, is bad, exactly. I can step back into my film-critic mode and observe that it has more vitality, more cinematic crispness and more of that familiar self-lacerating/other-people-lacerating humor than anything he's made since "Husbands and Wives" in 1992. In a sense, that's precisely the problem: "Deconstructing Harry" is the movie that the faithful few have been waiting for, through Allen's recent stretch of competent comedies (which we secretly believed merited neither his attention nor ours). And it's a movie that told the faithful few, in no uncertain terms, to go fuck ourselves. I'm talking here about the hardest of Allen's core audience, we band of brothers and sisters who prized his darker obscurities of the '80s far above his sunnier, more accessible works. When the pleasant yuppie couples burbled over "Hannah and Her Sisters," we smiled tolerantly and inwardly rolled our eyes. (At any minute they were going to start complaining that Woody wasn't funny anymore.) We were made of sterner stuff; give us the mordant Chekhov-in-Vermont acidity of "September," the Felliniesque self-parody of "Stardust Memories," even the earnest imitation Bergman of "Interiors." On some level, we believed we had a private understanding with Allen. He'd keep his career commercially afloat with bourgeois entertainments like "Hannah" or "Radio Days" or "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy." We'd shut up about them and be rewarded with the movies that he really wanted to make, the movies that only we could understand. It's easy to look back and say that this relationship was pathetic and dysfunctional even at its best, but genuine passion, by its very nature, is not susceptible to reason. Why did the romantic Reds of the '30s worship Stalin, or the postwar intellectuals fetishize Sartre and de Beauvoir (to mention two other passions that ended badly)? I suppose because they were the only models they had, and Woody Allen was about all the weedy, overeducated aesthetes of this country had in the 1980s. In an age of blockbuster spectacle, Allen was small and intimate; in an age of action, he was all talk. He was the only visible heir to the serious and personal European filmmaking of the '50s and '60s, which had crucially shaped the sensibility of baby-boom intellectuals. This in turn connected him to the fading dramatic tradition of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov. In other words, he was the only contemporary American filmmaker whose work seemed rooted in high culture and an old-style liberal education, which otherwise began to feel like dead ends in the age of "Blade Runner" and MTV. Rather than expounding endlessly on a general theory -- which is exactly what a Woodycentrist would do, of course -- perhaps I should discuss a specific case. After all, I don't know how anybody else became dangerously overidentified with a self-absorbed, aging comedian. I only know how I did: Woody Allen became my father. (If that sounds like a joke from one of Allen's less memorable movies, I suppose that's only fitting.) N E X T_P A G E _| How Woody became my dad

ILLUSTRATION BY ERIC WHITE