Annie Hall was Allen’s breakthrough film. It introduced, for the first time in a serious manner, many of the most important philosophical themes that would concern Allen throughout the next two decades. These themes include the following:
1) preoccupation with existential issues of freedom, responsibility, anguish, guilt, alienation and the role of the outsider; bad faith; and authenticity;
2) obsession with the oppressiveness of an awareness of our own mortality;
3) concern about issues relating to romantic love, sexual desire and changing cultural gender roles; and
4) interest in, and suspicion of, the techniques of Freudian psychoanalysis as a method for better understanding human thinking and behavior.
While many of the elements of the look and spirit of Annie Hall are present in Allen’s earlier work, especially in Play It Again, Sam, it is in Annie Hall that it all comes together most satisfyingly. The organization of Annie Hall may be viewed as a series of therapy sessions with Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) as the patient and the audience as analysts. Like many psychotherapy patients, Alvy is always trying to put the best possible face on his actions in order to legitimize his choices. Our job in the audience is to act as good analysts and perceive, through the clues he has left us, his true feelings. While Freud’s theories would obviously apply to this analysis, Allen’s own fascination with existential themes, and the specific reference to Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, encourage us to augment Freud with these additional approaches.
It has now become legend that Allen’s original title for the film was Anhedonia, defined by Webster’s as the “lack of pleasure or of the capacity to experience it.” Had this title remained, it clearly would have applied to Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, not to the character played by Diane Keaton for whom the film was eventually named. What brought about Allen’s decision to shift our attention from his own character and make Annie the film’s central figure?
The film starts with white titles on a black background. While this form of opening credits has become one of the signatures of an Allen film, this was his first use of it, with its characteristic small type and with no music or sound. Earlier Allen films used the white titles on a black background—Love and Death and Sleeper—but in both cases, the titles were much larger, and lively music accompanied them. This opening to Annie Hall immediately focuses our attention by suggesting that we are about to witness something different, something more serious, than Allen has ever showed us before.
We next see Allen standing in front of a solid orange background, dressed in sports shirt and jacket. He immediately begins speaking directly to the camera:
There’s an old joke. Two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort and one of them says, “Boy! The food at this place is really terrible!” The other one says, “Yeah, I know. And such small portions!”
Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life: full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly!
The other important joke for me is the one that’s usually attributed to Groucho Marx but I think it appears originally in Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. And it goes like this, I’m paraphrasing. I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member! That’s the key joke of my adult life in terms of my relationships with women.
Allen goes on to tell us that he just turned forty and he is going through a “life crisis,” although he is not worried about aging. After a brief routine on how he will probably get better with age (unless, of course he gets worse), Allen sighs and finally tells us that this self-examination is prompted by his breakup with Annie. Claiming that he is not a “depressive character” and that he was a “reasonably happy kid,” he cuts to a scene from his childhood where this claim is immediately contradicted. A boy, obviously Allen’s character as a child (he has red hair and the trademark glasses), is slouched on a sofa as his mother tells the doctor, “He’s been depressed. All of a sudden, he can’t do anything.” We learn that the cause of his depression is the fact that the universe is expanding. He explains in a monotone to Dr. Flicker, “Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding then someday it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.” His mother agitatedly replies, “What is that your business?” To the doctor, “He’s stopped doing his homework!”
CHILD: What’s the point?
MOTHER: What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!
FLICKER: (gesturing with lit cigarette in his hand) It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we’ve got to enjoy ourselves while we’re here, huh? huh? (laughs)
In this prologue, all of the film’s main concerns (mortality, low self-esteem, romance, and existential anxiety) are laid out. At first, we may think the character speaking directly to us is Woody Allen himself—as the film’s writer-director introducing the film, as other directors have done in the past (e.g., Hitchcock in the opening of his pseudo-documentary The Wrong Man in 1956). It is only when Allen mentions his breakup with Annie that we suspect he is in another character.
This is finally confirmed when the doctor calls the child Alvy, yet our identification of this character with the real Allen remains throughout the film and is stronger than in any of his previous films. The first name, Alvy, sounds like Allen, and the “y” on the end of the name fits with the “y” at the end of “Woody.” Furthermore, Alvy Singer started as a gag writer for others until he built up the courage to perform his own material as a stand-up comic; now he has become a playwright and a popular television performer. All of this can be said as well of Woody Allen. (In fact, early in the film, we see a clip of Alvy as a guest on the Dick Cavett show which we could easily mistake for a genuine clip of Woody Allen.) When Alvy is recognized on the street while waiting for Annie in front of a movie theater, we cannot help thinking that his obvious discomfort reflects Allen’s real feelings about fame, just as we may believe he is venting his real irritation with critics and fans in the later Stardust Memories.
This sense that art is imitating life is further confirmed if one knows that Allen and Keaton really were once involved romantically, and that Keaton’s real name at birth was Diane Hall (Annie’s first name may well be a tribute to a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s first existential novel, Nausea). Yet, according to Yacowar:
Allen denies that the film is autobiographical, beyond the fact that “there have been a couple of true facts in nearly every movie I’ve done.” His affair with Keaton was not like Alvy’s with Annie; nor were their meeting and parting as depicted in the film [1991, p. 172].
This initial identification of the characters with actual people counteracts our expectation of just another funny movie. It contributes, along with many other elements, to the effort of persuading us that this film, though quite funny, is more “real” and deserves more serious attention than its predecessors.
Alvy clearly has problems with his self-esteem. Throughout the film, he swings back and forth between arrogant self-confidence and submissive self-hatred. Like many people who suffer from low self-esteem, Alvy often overcompensates by judging others as harshly as he judges himself. In such moods, Alvy is a proud man who does not suffer fools gladly.
We see an example of this in Alvy’s impatience with the boorish Italian men who bother him in front of a movie theater, not because they know who Alvy is, but simply because he is famous, he’s “somebody.” Our first look at Annie occurs in this scene. We share Alvy’s irritation with her for making him wait under this barrage of attention from cretins, but we are also aware that he is treating Annie in an obnoxious, even sexist manner, attributing her bad mood to menstruation and refusing to go into the movie two minutes late. Alvy concedes that he’s “anal,” and Annie responds, “That’s a polite word for what you are.”
The film they were supposed to see was Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face, which Leonard Maltin describes as a “drama about [a] woman psychiatrist who suffers [a] severe nervous breakdown. As harrowing as they come…” (1990, p. 337). Alvy insists they go once again to see Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, which Annie describes as “a four-hour documentary about Nazis.” We can now see that Alvy’s childhood pessimism and depression have continued into adulthood. He’s obsessed with exploring his despair over the apparent meaninglessness of life and, as we shall soon see, his terror of death. Both films mentioned describe the plight of very successful people (a psychiatrist in Face to Face, well-established citizens in Nazi-occupied France in The Sorrow and the Pity) who collapse under the weight of life’s burdens. Alvy has already hinted at his fear of doing the same when he jokes earlier that he might end up as a drooling old man who wanders around spouting about socialism. Underneath Alvy’s arrogance and self-assurance is a man overwhelmed by his fears, one who resents others’ claims to intellectual insight, yet desires adulation for his own views.
This is driven home in the film’s most famous scene, in which Alvy and Annie wait in line for The Sorrow and the Pity as a man behind them (Russell Horton) arrogantly instructs his date on the inadequacies of Fellini, Beckett, and television. With the man’s pedantries as a backdrop, Annie and Alvy argue about her having slept late and missed her therapy session.
When Alvy interprets her actions as hostile gestures towards him, Annie correctly points out that he is only capable of viewing her problems and behavior in the context of himself. He has no respect for her as an independent person. (The film will soon show us that Alvy sees himself as the center of Annie’s life, almost her creator.) Annie sarcastically tells Alvy that she knows he believes she is hostile to him because of “our sexual problems.” When Alvy denies this, she changes her phrasing to “my sexual problems,” demonstrating her resentment towards Alvy’s claim that he is “normal” and, that, therefore, their problems must be her fault. As the man behind them continues to pontificate, it becomes clear that Alvy resents him because he embodies many of Alvy’s own worst traits.
This man, who claims to teach at Columbia, spews an endless stream of insights onto his date (who never says a word). Like Alvy, he believes himself an intellectual and emotional mentor for his female companion. The scene’s famous payoff comes as, in another fantasy sequence, Alvy directly addresses the audience looking for our confirmation of the man’s obnoxiousness. When the man defends his knowledge of Marshall McLuhan (telling us that he teaches a course in “TV, Media, and Culture”), Alvy crushes him by bringing the real Marshall McLuhan from behind a lobby poster. Alvy smirks in satisfaction as McLuhan tells the professor, “You know nothing of my work, you mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!” “Boy, if life were only like this!” Alvy joyfully exclaims to the audience.
What Alvy means is, “If only I ruled the world!” Those familiar with McLuhan cannot fail to notice that the professor’s statements do in fact show some awareness of his theory. Further, McLuhan’s condemnation of the man (“you mean my whole fallacy is wrong”) is so oddly constructed, with its double negation, that it is virtually meaningless. The real McLuhan, we suspect, would never actually talk to anyone in such a derogatory, obfuscated way. This fantasy McLuhan is completely at Alvy’s command; he acts and speaks as Alvy wishes. Thus we see that Alvy wants to be the focus not only of Annie’s world, but of the entire world. Again and again, he uses the comic device of having strangers in the street comment on the events in his life, answering his questions and offering suggestions. Like the protagonist in the later “Oedipus Wrecks” sequence in New York Stories, Alvy imagines a world where everyone is interested in his private dilemmas, while, simultaneously, he neither knows nor cares about the lives of others. Alvy’s anhedonia results from this self-obsessive bad faith (a Sartrean notion).
Using the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to interpret Alvy’s behavior (and to define “bad faith”), we can come to a better understanding of Alvy’s condition. Sartre describes the human condition, that of the for-itself, as one of emptiness and nihilation in the face of a world, an in-itself, which is both complete and meaningless. The for-itself has no essence and no being, which is why it is able to comprehend the in-itself. For Sartre, only “what is not” is able to understand “what is.” It is through this nihilating capacity that the for-itself is able to distinguish itself from the in-itself. The for-itself always retains the possibility of negating the in-itself. While the in-itself is always complete in its existence, the for-itself is always incomplete due to its isolation and non-being.
Sartre concludes from this examination of negation that the for-itself is perpetually lacking and envious of the completeness of the in-itself. The for-itself exists without essence and with total possibility to accept or negate what appears to him as the in-itself. At the same time, however, because of the for-itself’s lack of essence, each human being is also totally responsible for his or her acts. One does what one does because one has chosen to do so.
When a person comes to really understand and experience this total freedom and responsibility, as Alvy clearly has, he is filled with anguish. Anguish is the apprehension born of the realization that you must make choices—not to choose is a choice in itself—and that there is nothing to guarantee the validity of the values you choose. Values must be chosen without reference to any ultimate guideline, since we are unable to prove that such guidelines exist. Each person creates value by choosing to cherish those things which are seen as desirable. Each seeks to make himself complete or fulfilled in the sense that the in-itself is fulfilled. Thus each person completely creates an individual being by the way in which he constitutes his values.
Out of this anguish there often arises what Sartre calls bad faith. Bad faith occurs when a person lies to himself and thereby refuses to accept his freedom and the responsibility which goes with it. One common form of bad faith discussed by Sartre derives from our desire to become simultaneously conscious (that is, free) and complete. We want to control everything, especially the reactions of others to ourselves, while maintaining the fiction that they choose to be with us, and admire us, of their own free will. In acting as though this desire were realizable, and in punishing others, especially Annie, when they fail to participate in this fantasy, Alvy chooses to engage in self-deception. He clearly knows that his goal of being godlike is unattainable, yet he pretends to himself that his egocentric actions are somehow justifiable.
Elements of Alvy’s paranoid bad faith litter the film. When we first see Alvy with his best friend, Rob, he is humorously accusing everyone he meets of anti–Semitism. He claims that a man muttered “Jew” under his breath after the completion of a mixed doubles tennis match. He also insists that a “guy” from NBC named Tom Christie (Dick’s last name in Play It Again, Sam and a clear sign of his gentileness), when asked if he had eaten lunch, responded, “‘No, Jew’? Not ‘did you’ but ‘Jew’? Jew eat? Do you get it? Jew eat?” Rob sees Alvy’s paranoia as one of the effects of living in Manhattan. The solution, in his view, is to move to California. This suggestion appalls Alvy, whose hatred of California, especially Los Angeles, becomes a major theme of the film. From Alvy’s perspective, the possibility that living in New York accentuates one’s sense of persecution and awareness of life’s final futility is an important reason for remaining there. To move to Los Angeles would be to abandon both the best and worst elements of civilized human life. It would be a betrayal of the human obligation to deal “face to face” with one’s deepest anxieties. For, despite the evidence that Alvy is ultimately in bad faith, there is also no doubt that Alvy, like Allan in Play It Again, Sam, has a deep sense of personal integrity and honor. He punishes himself, and those around him, out of this sense of duty. It is wrong, in his view, to enjoy life once one has recognized its fundamental horror.
The three major characters in this film are played by the same actors who appeared in Play It Again, Sam. In fact, Annie Hall is a reworking of the themes of Sam in the context of the self-confident Allan Felix of that film’s ending. Once again, Tony Roberts plays his best friend, and through this friend Allen’s character meets the Diane Keaton character, again initially presented as insecure and even more neurotic than Allen. Once more, their characters develop a Pygmalion-Galatea relationship in which Allen educates Keaton and helps her to become a more fulfilled person, until finally she chooses to leave Allen in favor of a return, of a sort, to Roberts by following his lead in moving to Los Angeles.
In this film, however, the relationship between the characters played by Keaton and Roberts is quite different. In Sam, they were married, which ostensibly presented the major obstacle to the Keaton-Allen romance. In Annie Hall, Annie and Rob are just friends; yet an obstacle does destroy the Keaton-Allen romance, and that obstacle is again thematically identified with Roberts’s character. This character is named “Rob,” a name which again suggests close identification between a character and the actor playing him.
Rob tells Alvy that he wants to move west—“California, Max, we get the hell out of this crazy city and move to sunny L.A. All of show business is out there, Max.” In this film, as in other Allen movies (e.g., Manhattan), the city of New York is itself a character. For Allen, it is the only place where life may be faced honestly.
In this conversation, we hear Rob call Alvy “Max” for the first time. Alvy tells Rob not to call him that, but Rob responds, “Why not? It’s a good name for you.” Alvy retaliates by calling Rob “Max” as well, but we know it’s really Rob’s name for Alvy. Why is Max a good name for Alvy? Well, knowing Allen’s universe of allusions, the name is suspiciously reminiscent of the famous Swedish actor Max von Sydow, who played the morose, anguished protagonist in so many of the films of Ingmar Bergman. Later, in Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen will actually use von Sydow himself to play a role very much like Alvy.
Returning to Alvy’s exclamation in the theater lobby—“Boy, if life were only like this!”—the film responds by cutting to a clip from The Sorrow and the Pity in which the narrator describes the way life is more likely to be: “June 14, 1940. The German army occupies Paris. All over the country, people are desperate for every available scrap of wood.” Not only are we not able to magically win every argument, but at any time, through no fault of our own, we may find our nation occupied by an evil enemy and ourselves struggling to survive. The real human condition is a bitter disappointment to an Alvy who dreams of godlike powers; nevertheless, like the women at the Catskills resort, no matter how bad things get, Alvy wants life to go on forever.
Alvy believes that Annie’s appearance is primarily determined, not by any of her own characteristics, but instead by the qualities of the man who accompanies her. We enter Annie’s memories of her earlier boyfriends, including a hippie artist of whom Alvy is obviously jealous. As in his fantasy of Nancy’s biker boyfriend in Sam, Annie’s flame is a tall, blond, hip-looking actor named Jerry (John Glover). Alvy and Annie visit a memory of a party where they watch Jerry come on to a very insecure Annie. With his usual condescension, Alvy exclaims, “Look at you, you’re such a clown!” Annie responds, “I look pretty!” to which Alvy says, “Yeah, but look at that guy with you!”
Just as Alvy believes that Annie now looks great because she is under his tutelage, he devalues her earlier worth in accordance with his opinion of her male companion. Later in the film we will see him do this again as he analyzes evidence in her apartment to construct a negative picture of her new boyfriend. (Finding a copy of the National Review and a program from a rock concert, he concludes that she is going out with “a right-wing rock and roll star.” Annie gives in to his rewriting of her history by agreeing that Jerry was “creepy,” as Alvy happily tells her that she was lucky he came along. This leads to Annie’s first use of her trademark expression, “La-de-da!” which, of course, Alvy ridicules.
Later, we see Alvy and Rob preparing for a game of indoor tennis as Alvy resumes his ranting about the anti–Semitism that surrounds him. Now he claims that the rest of the country hates New York City because they perceive it as a hotbed of “left-wing, Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers,” admitting that even he “thinks of us that way sometimes and I live here!” Rob perceptively remarks, “This is just a very convenient out. Whenever any group disagrees with you, it’s because of anti–Semitism.” Rob returns to his campaign for the West Coast, pointing out that if they lived in California, they could play outside all the time.
It turns out that the game of tennis marks Alvy’s first meeting with Annie. After the game, Alvy and Annie run into each other in the lobby of the tennis club. Their interaction is dramatically different from the usual Allen persona pick-up scenes from earlier films. If this were any of Allen’s previous films, especially Sam, Alvy would be nervously trying to impress an uninterested Annie, but that situation is here reversed. As we have repeatedly seen, Alvy is a much more self-assured person than is his usual “little man.” He is the confident Allan of Sam’s ending, a more mature man (we are told he’s forty) who has experienced the dissolution of two marriages (as had the real Allen by 1977). In this film’s only earlier pickup scene (with Alvy’s first wife Alison), Alvy was more arrogant than Allan would have been, but in his nervousness (either partially or mostly caused by stage fright) he was both rude and patronizing.
This time, however, Annie plays the role of nervous suitor, while Alvy is calm, cool, and collected. Her body language, her fumbling for words, her self-derision, and her confusion over who should give a ride to whom, all underline her desperate desire to make a good impression on Alvy. That she is taking the mating role usually reserved for males in our society is emphasized by her unusually masculine attire. Annie Hall’s look in this film started a fashion craze, which may partially obscure the fact that when the film was released, it was by no means common for a woman to wear a man’s tie and vest. Her gender-crossing clothing, which contrasts dramatically with Alvy’s traditionally male white sports shirt and beige slacks, emphasizes their differences.
When Rob and Alvy first appear on the tennis court, it is obvious that the two women (the other presumably Rob’s girlfriend) have been discussing Annie’s nervousness about meeting Alvy. We know that Alvy is a famous comic who has appeared on television, so in a sense Annie already knows and admires him from afar; but Alvy doesn’t know Annie, again the reverse of the clichéd boy-girl meeting.
Alvy is older and more experienced than Annie. In an earlier high school flashback, Annie was shown meeting a date in front of a movie theater with her hair in a beehive looking like what Alvy describes as “the wife of an astronaut.” On the theater’s marquee, we can see that The Misfits is playing, a film released in 1961. We already know that by 1956 Alvy was a professional stand-up comedian meeting his first wife. So far as we know, Annie’s romantic experience prior to meeting Alvy was limited to a few adolescent boyfriends and Jerry, the overbearing actor. Alvy is already a professional success, while Annie has little confidence in her abilities in the areas in which she “dabbles”—acting, photography, and singing. Thus the scene is set for Alvy to move completely into his favorite role, that of the romantic mentor taking in hand his younger, less sophisticated female protégée.
We are introduced to Annie’s terrible driving as Alvy admits that he can’t drive because he uses driving to express hostility, a claim resoundingly confirmed later in the film. We are also introduced to Annie’s eminently Waspish background, which Alvy describes as being out of a Norman Rockwell painting. She’s from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and she calls her grandmother “Grammy Hall.” Annie emphasizes the cultural gap between them, and confirms Alvy’s obsessions about anti–Semitism, when she confesses to Alvy that he is what Grammy would describe as “a real Jew.”
Alvy talks openly about his fifteen years of analysis. Later, when he acknowledges that he is still sweaty after the tennis game because he never showers in a public place in front of other men “of the same gender,” Annie emphasizes the neurotic nature of his homophobia by commenting, “Fifteen years, eh?”
We watch as the two of them traverse the comic terrain of the first stages of a relationship. Allen cleverly shows us their feeble attempts to impress one another as subtitles tell us their real feelings and fears. Both of them worry that they will appear shallow as the scene perfectly captures the interaction which Sartre describes as “the look.” While this scene is a stroke of genius in its universal appeal (we have all been there), it also serves to emphasize the artificiality of their relationship’s beginnings.
From the start, their romance is more contrived than spontaneous. Annie arranges to meet Alvy. Her efforts to continue their interaction after the tennis match and outside her apartment are blatantly strained. When they finally make a date to go out (on the very night of her audition as a lounge singer), Alvy suggests that they kiss on their way to dinner so they can get it over with and enjoy the rest of their evening without anxiety.
Annie’s audition is everyone’s nightmare of a first performance, with crashing plates, ringing phones, and an inattentive audience. It will be contrasted later in the film with her more polished performance as she grows into her professional self and out of her need for Alvy as a mentor. But at this early point in their relationship, we watch Alvy encourage and mold her into the person he thinks she should be.
In a bookstore, Alvy wants Annie to read two books on death titled Death and Western Thought and The Denial of Death. The second book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is Ernest Becker’s analysis of the inherent terror of dying. Becker, through an analysis of such thinkers as Kierkegaard and the psychologist Otto Rank, contends that a Heideggerean dread of death is the most natural human condition, and that we engage in actions which we perceive as “heroic” or “spiritual” in order to inauthentically escape that fear as opposed to honestly confronting it.
Here is Alvy’s real answer to those (like Rob) who propose flight from the depressed craziness of Manhattan in search of a mellower, less stressful life in more idyllic surroundings. To Alvy, New York symbolizes authentic acceptance of the human condition. Trying to escape that awareness results in a form of self-deception akin to Kierkegaard’s life of the esthetic, the hedonist who believes the search for pleasure alone is ultimately life’s goal.
Like Kierkegaard, Alvy believes that such a lifestyle only momentarily diverts one from the abyss. It is better, and more moral, to live life with a grim recognition of one’s inalterable condition, exercising one’s freedom in aesthetic pursuits. Alvy fully reveals his ethical commitment to anhedonia when he tells Annie:
You know, I’m obsessed with death, a big subject with me, yeah. I have a very pessimistic view of life. You should know about this if we are going to go out. You know, I feel that life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable. Those are the two categories. The horrible would be like, um, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, cripples. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me, you know. And the miserable is everyone else. So, so, when you go through life, you should be thankful that you are miserable because you are very lucky to be miserable.
Becker combines existential and psychoanalytic themes to suggest that the natural way to deal with this pessimistic yet honest realization is through “transference,” the drive to create meaning for one’s life by projecting one’s own chosen values onto the rest of the world:
As Rank so wisely saw, projection is a necessary unburdening of the individual; man can not live closed upon himself and for himself. He must project the meaning of his life outward, the reason for it, even the blame for it. We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves. Technically, we say that transference is a distortion of reality. But now we see that this distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self expansion and the intimate connection of one’s inner self to surrounding nature. In other words, transference reflects the whole of the human condition and raises the largest philosophical question about that condition [1973, p. 158].
The most obvious way to engage in this creative transference is by shaping another person into a replica of oneself with all of one’s judgments and values. We see Alvy doing this with Annie as they sit in the park and Alvy neatly sketches the characters of passersby, sticking them into this or that clever category, just as we saw him reduce Alison to a cultural stereotype. Alvy succeeds in taking control of all of Annie’s thoughts and actions at this point; when she says she likes him, he ups the ante by asking if she loves him. When Annie asks if he loves her, he says his feelings for her go beyond love; a new word is needed to describe his feelings.
His exhilaration derives from his success at fulfilling his deepest godlike fantasy of creating another person in his own image. Becker states that this is a way of attempting to achieve immortality by perpetuating one’s own admittedly idiosyncratic neuroses through another person. Traditionally, one accomplishes this through marriage and family. After all, the most obvious way to strive for immortality is by producing and rearing physical copies of oneself.
The problem with this solution, according to Becker, is that it stems from our species sameness; it submerges one’s individuality. Becker puts it this way:
Although he perpetuates himself in his offspring, who may resemble him and carry some of his “blood” and the mystical quality of some of his ancestors, he may not feel that he is truly perpetuating his own inner self, his distinctive personality, his spirit as it were. He wants to achieve something more than mere animal succession. The distinctive human problem from time immemorial has been the need to spiritualize human life, to lift it onto a special immortal human plane, beyond the cycles of life and death that characterize all other organisms [1973, p. 231].
One way of doing this, Becker points out, is through what he calls “perversions” and “fetishisms.” By departing from the accepted norm of reproductive behavior, one asserts one’s individuality, one’s stamp of uniqueness. This accounts, in Becker’s and Rank’s view, for the Greeks’ high regard for homosexual relationships, especially boy-love, as an idealization of romantic love because they have no specific reproductive purpose. The sole goal of a man-boy relationship lies in the man’s attempt to fashion the boy into a spiritual reproduction of himself:
In terms of our discussion we can see that this attempt represents the complete causa-sui project: to create all by oneself a spiritual, intellectual, and physically similar replica of oneself: the perfectly individualized self-perpetuation or immortality symbol [Becker, 1973, p. 232].
This may account for Alvy’s sensitivity about appearing naked in front of other men and his avid acceptance of the Playboy mentality with its glorification of “scoring” with women and its thinly disguised gay bashing. This is not to suggest that Alvy has any more repressed homosexual urges than do most heterosexual men. Rather it implies that, although Alvy is not physically attracted to men, he is at some level aware of the Greeks’ approach to such idealized love and wishes to mimic its metaphysical advantages in his relationship to women. Alvy is aroused by the existence of the women’s movement in general, with its insistence that women are the equal of men, just as he is specifically attracted to Annie, who by her dress, manner, and aspirations seeks to be his equal. The rest of the film chronicles the results of Alvy’s attempt to mold Annie into a replica of himself while maintaining his individuality, and without allowing her to become her own person and realize that she no longer needs him.
This analysis explains Alvy’s reluctance to allow Annie to move into his apartment. He insists that she maintain her own place as “a free-floating life raft so that we know we are not married.” Confirming this view is the fact that there has been no mention of the possibility of children with his two previous wives, nor is the matter ever discussed with Annie. We will have to wait for Hannah and Her Sisters to see this issue dealt with seriously in an Allen film.
At their beach house, we see Annie and Alvy reclining on the bed as Annie consults Alvy about the proper college courses to take to expand herself. By this point, he’s giving her reading lists, and is even presumptuous enough to insist that she stop her habit of smoking grass to relax her before they make love. According to Becker (1973, pp. 235–6), Annie’s need to smoke grass would be an example of the kind of perversion or fetish discussed by psychologists such as Freud, Boss, and Greenacre. From this perspective, taking a pill, or smoking a joint, acts as a kind of magic potion, relieving Annie’s anxieties about the loss of the uniqueness of her individual identity in the common species activity of intercourse.
This analysis is similar to Sartre’s interpretation of the use of emotion as a tool for entering a magical realm where one’s dreams may be fulfilled, even if they are self-contradictory. By insisting that Annie give up her magic charm, Alvy is attempting to strip her of the last remnants of her individuality, like Scotty in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), who insisted that Judy put her hair up like Madeleine’s. Judy thoroughly gave in to Scotty’s demands, and thereby lost her soul; Annie, however, responds in a healthier way by splitting herself in two during their lovemaking. In a brilliant scene, we see Annie’s spirit jump out of her body and move over to a chair, where she asks the lovers if they’ve seen her sketch pad so that she may develop her artistic side while her body is possessed by Alvy.
Alvy is dissatisfied with this arrangement because, as usual, he wants everything. In Sartrean terms, he wants to control Annie both sexually and spiritually, while at the same time he wants to feel that Annie’s submission to him is entirely voluntary. When Annie demands to know why he’s so threatened by her use of her charm, he compares it to performing before an audience that’s stoned. He wants to know that the laughs he gets are solely the results of his talents and not of intoxication. By comparing her to an audience member, he confirms her fears that he has no respect for her as an individual, as well as her awareness that he sees her as an onlooker there to appreciate him, as opposed to an active participant in their relationship.
We next see the successful Alvy performing his material to an enthusiastic college audience at the University of Wisconsin, near enough to Annie’s home to allow for a meeting between him and the Halls. Alvy’s dinner with the Halls reemphasizes the cultural gulf that separates him from Annie. Earlier, when they went out to get sandwiches at a New York deli, Alvy had been amazed when Annie ordered a pastrami sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomatoes. Now, he sits at the dinner table in a sunny dining room with a family he describes this way:
I can’t believe this family! Annie’s mother is really beautiful, and they’re talking swap meets and boat basins and the old lady at the end of the table is a classic Jew-hater. They really look American, you know, very healthy, like they never get sick or anything. Nothing like my family, you know, the two are like oil and water.
At this comment, a scene of Alvy’s extended family arguing, yelling, and gossiping at a meal takes up three-quarters of the screen. Mom Hall (Colleen Dewhurst), still visible in the screen’s left-hand corner, asks the Singers how they plan to spend the holidays (it’s Easter weekend). Alvy’s mother (Joan Newman) and father (Mordecai Learner) take the question in a Jewish context, assuming that she is referring to the most important Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. They tell her that they will fast to atone for their sins, and when Mom Hall says she doesn’t understand, Alvy’s father says, “To tell you the truth, neither do we!”
From Alvy’s perspective, Annie’s family lives in a bright, sunny world which supplies them with good health, economic well-being, and a sense of belonging. Alvy, who fantasizes that the Halls see him in the garb of a Hasidic Jew, is the perpetual outsider from the hated New York City, a world of darkness and pessimism, a world where people fast to atone for sins they don’t understand. Alvy sees his world as the real one, and he feels a moral duty to bring Annie into it.
The next scene belies the assumptions of its predecessor (for example, that the Halls never get sick) when we learn that Annie’s brother, Duane, suffers from obsessions which exceed even Alvy’s own dark pessimism. Sitting on his bed in his dimly lit room, Duane tells Alvy that he wants to confess something because he believes that Alvy, as a “fellow artist,” will understand. He describes his desire to kill himself by driving into the headlights of an oncoming car, and shares his images of the horrible nature of such a crash. Alvy is shaken by this revelation, telling Duane that he has to leave because he’s “due back on the planet Earth,” even though we know that Duane is correct in assuming that Alvy shares his obsession with death.
Here Allen again reveals his agreement with Becker and the existentialists in their claim that the horror of living is a human universal, not a viewpoint limited to any particular cultural or religious group. He also cracks open the door to an analysis of such themes in the context of an all–American Waspish family, an analysis which he will pursue in much greater and more serious detail in his next film, Interiors.
We next see Mom and Dad Hall saying goodbye to Annie as she prepares to leave for the airport. This is presumably taking place while Alvy is still in Duane’s room. If we listen closely, we can hear Mom Hall telling Annie that she thinks he’s adorable as Annie responds, “Do you really think so?” As Annie goes to get Alvy, we see Mom and Dad Hall happily kissing.
This scene further undermines Alvy’s assumptions at the dinner table about who the Halls are and what they are feeling. In fact, it appears that the Halls liked Alvy, and they share a more complex emotional life than he imagined. After the obligatory gag scene of Duane driving Alvy and Annie to the airport in the rain as Alvy glances nervously over to Duane, we move forward in time to the deterioration of Alvy’s and Annie’s relationship.
Alvy has taken to spying on Annie, following her from the very class that he encouraged her to take, because he is afraid that she is having an affair with her professor. Annie is appalled by this invasion of her privacy and vehemently denies any romance. She is hurt by Alvy’s assumption that the professor would take interest in her only if they were having a sexual relationship. To him, she complains, it is unthinkable that the professor would want to talk with her after class just because he thinks she’s “neat.”
Alvy derides the course’s content by making up a phony name for it (“Contemporary Crisis in Western Man”) when in fact the real course title—Existential Motifs in Russian Literature—is right down Alvy’s alley, as we know from Allen’s previous film, Love and Death, a send-up of such motifs. Here again, we see Alvy’s need to be the source of Annie’s intellectual views. He rejects any intellectualism other than his own, describing it as “crap” and “mental masturbation.” To Annie’s insightful rejoinder that the latter is a subject on which Alvy is expert, he responds honestly, “Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.”
Annie reminds Alvy that he is the one who didn’t want to make a commitment, who wanted to keep the relationship “flexible.” She reminds him of their discussion at the beach house the month before following Annie’s first therapy session, therapy that Alvy encouraged her to enter and is paying for. Alvy is shocked to learn that Annie made more progress in one session than he’s made in fifteen years (she even cried) and that the therapist is interpreting her dreams in ways that are critical of Alvy.
Annie describes a dream in which she is being suffocated by Frank Sinatra with a pillow. Alvy wants to interpret this to mean that Annie is suffocating herself, but according to the analyst, Alvy is suffocating Annie. The analyst pointed out that Alvy’s last name is Singer and that in Annie’s dream she breaks Sinatra’s glasses. Alvy is also unpleasantly surprised to hear that in the dream Annie “does something” to Sinatra so that he’s singing in a very high voice. The scene ends with Alvy encouraging Annie to take the very adult education courses that he is shown criticizing in the previous scene.
We return to that scene for a continuation of Alvy’s diatribe against adult education. As Annie gets into a cab, we hear her suggest, for the first time, that they break up. Alone on the street, Alvy lapses back into fantasy, stopping passersby to get their insights on love. An elderly woman pessimistically tells him that “love fades.” An average-looking older man reveals that Annie’s marijuana fetish is not as strange as Alvy thinks; he informs us that he and his wife use “a large vibrating egg” to enhance their sex.
In a famous moment, Alvy stops a young, attractive couple to ask the secret of their apparent happiness. The woman (Shelley Hack) responds, “Oh, I’m really shallow and empty, and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.” The man (James Burge) adds, “And I’m exactly the same.” This confirms Alvy’s earlier view that life is composed of the horrible and the miserable. Alvy would probably put this couple in the first category.
What happens next further confirms the contention that Annie Hall is a more sophisticated remake of Sam. Once again, as in Sam, the Tony Roberts character tells Alvy to forget Annie and let him fix Alvy up with a “dynamite woman,” just as Dick told Allan to forget about Nancy as he offered to fix him up with empty-headed women like Julie. In fact, Annie’s complaints about Alvy perfectly mimic Nancy’s condemnation of Allan when she told him, “I don’t find you any fun. I feel you suffocate me.”
While his date with Pam (Shelley Duvall), the reporter for Rolling Stone, ostensibly goes better than the date with Julie in Sam (he even “scores”), emotionally it is an empty experience. Pam is accurate when she describes sex with an Alvy who detests her “as a Kafkaesque experience.” As he lies next to Pam in the middle of the night, Alvy receives a phone call from Annie and promptly rushes to her apartment. In a reenactment of the romantic lobster scene, Alvy rescues her from a spider “the size of a Buick.” Annie confesses that she misses him. Alvy lies when she asks if he was with anybody (in his book, being with Pam was like being alone), yet he has no qualms about jealously sniffing out the clues lying around her apartment that suggest she has dated another man.
To celebrate the reconciliation, Alvy and Rob drive Annie out to Brooklyn to show her their old neighborhood. The scene is reminiscent of the same group’s drive to the beach in Sam, except that Annie is now in the driver’s seat. The nostalgic mood of this scene continues into the next as we revisit Annie singing in a nightclub (she even sings “Seems Like Old Times”). But, we soon discover, times have changed. Annie now is an accomplished performer, so accomplished in fact that a famous singer, Tony Lacy (Paul Simon), comes over with his entourage to congratulate her and ask her if she wants to join them for a drink with “Jack and Anjelica” (presumably Nicholson and Huston). Alvy, typically, forces Annie to refuse (“Remember, we have that thing?”), wanting to keep Annie for himself, but we can see that Annie is flattered and excited by the attention. Tony even suggests that he would like to talk to her about a recording contract and working together.
Annie berates Alvy for turning down the offer, and he responds with a diatribe on Tony’s comment that the evening would be “mellow.” Returning to the Manhattan-versus-L.A. dichotomy, Alvy says, “I don’t think I could take a mellow evening. I don’t respond well to ‘mellow.’ I have a tendency, if I mellow, I get too ripe and then I rot.” When Annie asks Alvy how he wants to spend the evening, the answer comes when the screen fills again with The Sorrow and the Pity. Alvy can’t give up his rituals of pessimism and despair.
During the Christmas season we travel with Annie and Alvy to Los Angeles, where Alvy is supposed to give out an award on television. Alvy’s reaction to California is exactly what we would expect. Rob has now moved there, and he brags that he has never been more relaxed. He even lives right next to Hugh Hefner: “And the women, Max, are just like the women in Playboy magazine except they can move their arms and legs.” Alvy is disgusted by the hodgepodge of architectural styles, and he responds to Annie’s observation that everything is so “clean” (sterile, in Alvy’s terms) by saying, “They don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.”
Alvy is literally nauseated as he watches Rob use a laugh track to manufacture phony appreciation for the lousy jokes on his “hit sitcom.” Alvy goes to a Hollywood party, where Allen’s relentless mocking of the “mellow” lifestyle hilariously continues. (In a cameo, Jeff Goldblum worriedly tells someone on the phone that he forgot his mantra.) The party is at the house of Tony Lacy, who uses his time with Annie to try to convince her to move into his house for six weeks so they can make an album. He says he used to live in New York, but now there’s too much “garbage”—in other words, it’s too real and depressing. Alvy accurately responds, “I’m into garbage.”
On the plane back, they both realize that they want to break up (Annie because even though she “adores” Alvy, their relationship “doesn’t seem to work anymore”; Alvy because he found it fun to flirt with other women). Alvy negatively compares a relationship to a shark: “It has to keep moving or it dies. What we’ve got on our hands is a dead shark.”
We see Alvy coming out of a movie theater alone, depressed about the breakup and missing Annie (we watched Allan do the same in reaction to his breakup with Nancy in Sam). Fantasy passersby tell him that Annie is living with Tony Lacy and advise him to date other women. Alvy flies back out to California to try to get Annie to return with him, but the trip is a disaster.
The meal Alvy and Annie share in Los Angeles parallels their earlier meal at the deli on their first date (Yacowar, 1991, p. 176). At that first meal, Alvy was the comfortable insider and Annie was the outsider, ordering improperly. Now Alvy is the alienated one. He tells Annie on the phone that he can feel the return of his “chronic Los Angeles nausea.” He rents a car, which we see him driving haltingly to the restaurant where they are to meet. Of course, it’s an outdoor health food restaurant (everything Alvy hates). Annie shows up looking very “L.A.” in a flowing white dress and stylish sunglasses.
Alvy tries to be nice (he tells her she looks “pretty”—again judging her by her appearance), but they soon fall back into their bickering as Alvy fails to convince her to come back with him. He even wants her to marry him, but she has gone over to the other side. She professes satisfaction with her hedonistic lifestyle of endless parties and tennis, and explicitly identifies Alvy with a New York which she describes as an island cut off from everything and “a dying city.” Alvy tries to define his philosophy by saying he can’t be happy if even one person is suffering, but we know this is a simplistically distorted version of his true views. Annie acknowledges Alvy’s role in molding her into the person she’s become, but she refuses to deny her feelings for his sake. Finally fed up, Annie leaves the table, with Alvy trailing her desperately as he continues to bicker.
After she’s gone, Alvy proves his much earlier claim that he uses driving to take out his hostility as he bashes his rental car into other vehicles in the parking lot. He compounds his difficulties by defying the traffic cop who comes on the scene demanding his license. The cop epitomizes everything Allen hates: a fascistically dressed symbol of male Californian order who sees him as just another bad driver. In response to his demand that Alvy “just give me your license, not your life story,” Alvy tears the license into tiny pieces, saying, “I have a terrific problem with authority. It’s not your fault. Don’t take it personal” (a retread of the gag from Sam in which Nancy tells Allan everything that’s wrong with him, but says, “Don’t take it personal”). Rob bails Alvy out of jail wearing a bizarre sun protection outfit that looks like a reject from Sleeper. Legalistically and stylistically, Allen suggests that California is rapidly becoming the empty society depicted in that earlier film.
We next see actors rehearsing the scene just played out between Alvy and Annie, except that in this version, the Annie character says she is going back to Alvy because she loves him. Alvy justifies this to the audience by saying, “What do you want? It was my first play. You know how you’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life?” It’s interesting that this is the only one of Alvy’s fantasies played out by people identifiable as actors in the film’s “real world,” instead of in a fantasy sequence. This and Alvy’s bittersweet but undeniably happier manner suggest that, as at the end of Sam, he has learned from his experiences and is now mature enough to accept the inevitability of his breakup with Annie. We suggested earlier that the entire film is in the form of a kind of therapy session. At its end, the therapy has apparently worked, as Alvy has overcome the anxiety of his opening monologue.
He tells us of running into Annie years later, dragging the guy she was living with in Soho into a showing of The Sorrow and the Pity, something he describes as a “real triumph.” While Annie is now clearly her own person (she’s the one doing the dragging), she has returned to Alvy’s values of existential authenticity as represented by living in Manhattan and feeling obliged to make regular pilgrimages to Ophuls’s film. Alvy describes a lunch where they kicked around old times. We see them laughing together hysterically, and then we are presented with a montage of scenes from their relationship, as we hear the swelling tones of Annie’s voice reprising her version of “Seems Like Old Times” on the soundtrack. Alvy has overcome his anger at Annie and accepted the fact that romance often confuses and disappoints us. But, as with life itself in the opening joke about the Catskills resort, we cling to the magic of love in dread of the alternative. He now realizes:
what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her and I thought of that old joke, you know? This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, my brother’s crazy, he thinks he’s a chicken. And the doctor says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?” And the guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs!” Well, I guess that’s now pretty much how I feel about relationships. You know, they’re totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, but I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs!
In a written exchange with me in 1994 (see Appendix), Allen says this about romance:
In relation to impossibility of authentic romantic commitment—this is a question of pure luck, the interfacing of two enormous complexities and the delusion that it can be “worked at” is just that. Efforts by the parties may aid in a small way but have the same relation to the success of a relationship that a writing class has to a real reader.