The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (7 page)

Ascribing such self-conscious aesthetic purposes to a Woody Allen film is, of course, a highly chancy business, not least because of the filmmaker’s impatience with excessively cerebral analyses of his work. “It astonishes me what a lot of intellectualizing goes on over my films,” Allen, rehearsing the attitude of dismissive skepticism we’ve previously seen him adopting in response to what he considers excessively ingenious readings of his work, objected. “They’re just films. Yet they treat me like a genius at times, at other times like a criminal. Because I’ ve produced ‘bad art.’”
¹³
The inconsistency of critical responses to his work probably does give Allen cause for complaint. And yet, Allen—whose films are so often
about
tensions between art and entertainment—is sometimes less willing than he might be to acknowledge how the character of his films and career have precipitated such contradictory responses.

Possibly
Take the Money and Run, Bananas
, and
Sleeper can
be designated “just films,” if what that means is that the fulfillment of their comic designs exhausts their aesthetic purposes—which would seem to limit criticism of these movies to the distinguishing between which scenes are funny and which aren’t. (That criticism is
never
limited to affect clearly dictates that—to film critics, at any rate—there are no such things as “just films,” no movies that
don’t
invoke meanings beyond their own adherence to generic templates.) Because he didn’t actually direct
Play It Again, Sam,
by Allen’s own estimation, and by nearly unanimous critical consent,
Annie Hall
represented the beginning of Allen’s serious filmmaking career. That means, assumedly, that the analysis of
Annie Hall
rewards critical scrutiny by revealing subtextual synapses and less-than-explicit thematic convergences which gradually accumulate to comprise an ideational/artistic coherence distinguishable from plot, a thematic intentionality apparently absent from the gag-to-gag structure of
Take the Money and Run
and
Sleeper
. Thus dawns, consequently, the descent into complexity, the beginning of the critical tendency to read Allen’s work as more than” just films.” what makes
Annie Hall
a text-to-be-interpreted while
Sleeper
and
Love and Death
remained “just films” unrewarding of critical scrutiny?

In addition to the
Annie
Hall screenplay’s greater depth of characterization and its effective convergence of setting with plot and theme, Allen and Marshall Brickman introduced into the film too many sophisticated rhetorical devices derived from film and drama for the movie to be perceived as pure comedy, for it to be understood solely in terms of its pervasive comic dynamics. Never completely distinguishable from gags, these devices reflect a self-consciousness about film craft categorically different from the periodic moments in Allen’s “earlier, funny movies.” It is these devices that will be the focus of our examination of
Annie Hall

3

Getting Serious

The Antimimetic Emblems of
Annie Hall

Boy, if life could only be like this!

—Alvy Singer, after producing Marshall McLuhan from behind a coming attractions billboard to defend his point of view against a boorish professor pontificating in a movie theater lobby in
Annie Hall

From its opening sample of Rick and Ilsa’s farewell scene to its closing comic revision of Michael Curtiz’s famous denouement,
Play It Again, Sam
is thoroughly preoccupied with
Casablanca;
what Allen’s film isn’t, as previously indicated, is a parody of
Casablanca
. Rather than merely exaggerating the melodrama of
Casablanca
for the purposes of satire,
Play It Again, Sam
critiques and reinterprets the medium it has appropriated, creating a dynamic tension between
Casablanca’s
primary projection, Bogart, and Allan Felix, an art/life tension which eventually produces the protagonist’s fully traditional reversal and recognition. Like the metafictional explorations of fairy tales, folk tales, and popular culture narratives conducted in the late ’60s by writers such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover, Allen’s
Play It Again, Sam
enriches the viewer’s response to
Casablanca
rather than merely deflating the original through caricature: it simultaneously exposes the adolescent thought-modes underlying
Casablanca
while dramatizing the tremendous hold they exert on the American male imagination.

Sleeper
and
Love and Death,
Allen’s films between
Play It
and
Annie Hall,
are parodies which only inconstantly delineate a coherent position on the protagonist’s relationship to the medium being parodied. If
Love and Death
is the more memorable of the two, it’s because of Allen’s greater affection for the material he’s spoofing there; the same brooding Russian literary spiritual introspectiveness which—as Douglas Brode noticed—will pervade
Interiors
and
September
inspires moments of brilliant parody in
Love and Death
.
¹
In other words, futuristic films and Russian literature provide Allen with numerous sources of gags in
Sleeper
and in
Love and Death,
but neither film adds much to the exploration of the interpenetrations of fiction and actuality he had begun with
Play It Again, Sam
.

In
Annie Hall,
of course, Allen returns to this project, transforming the discrepancy between aesthetic artifice and actuality from a wellspring of extended gags to a source of thematic unity. With
Annie Hall,
then, Allen takes full advantage of his status as screenwriter/director, revisiting the argument with artistic representation which he had begun waging in
Play It Again, Sam. Annie Hall
resumes Allen’s debate with himself over the possibility that art is synonymous with illusion-mongering and sentimental fraudulence. That skepticism is frequently expressed in Allen’s films through his characters’ offhand disparagements of aesthetic contrivance. “That’s movie talk, that’s not real,” Cecilia says in
The Purple Rose of Cairo;
“If you want a happy ending,” Judah tells Cliff in
Crimes and Misdemeanors,
“you should see a Hollywood movie”; for Rain in
Husbands and Wives,
writing fiction is “just a trick… When I was ten I wrote this whole story on Paris. It’s just a trick”; “I know, you’re an artist,” David Shayne’s agent fulminates at him in
Bullets Over Broadway,
“Now let me tell you something, kid—that’s a real world out there, and it’s a lot tougher than you think.” The inception of this debate, however, is located in
Annie Hall’s
Alvy Singer, who quite appropriately introduces himself as someone who has “a little trouble between fantasy and reality.”
²

In the play Alvy (Allen) writes, which is inspired by his relationship with Annie (Diane Keaton), the couple has a fractious confrontation in a Los Angeles health food restaurant, one culminating—as it never does in the film framing the play—in an utterly unmotivated reconciliation providing Alvy’s drama with a happy ending. The female lead of Alvy’s play, Sunny, delivers verbatim the lines that Annie uses in terminating her relationship with Alvy, accusing Alvy’s aptly named dramatic surrogate, Arty, “You’re like New York. You’re an island.” Arty responds with a melodramatic line which Alvy had the tact to suppress (“it all ends here, in a health food restaurant on Sunset Boulevard”) before taking leave of Sunny. “Wait, I’m going with you,” Sunny unexpectedly replies, bestowing on Arty the happy ending which Alvy is denied because of Annie’s silence as she and Alvy enter their cars in the health food restaurant parking lot. Apologizing for the sentimentality of his resolution, Alvy asks the movie audience, “Tsch, whatta you want? It was my first play. You know, you know how you’re always tryin’ t’ get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life” (p. 102). The great boon of art is that it is easier to resolve than life, which is also the incontestable proof of its innate capacity for falsification.

Alvy’s genial denigration of art as aesthetically ameliorated life is a pervasive postulate of Allen’s films, a theme evident in movies as early as
Play It Again, Sam
(Allan Felix ultimately resolving that he’s “short and ugly enough to make it on my own,”
³
thus relinquishing his
Casablanca-inspired
mentor and alter ego) to one as late as
Bullets Over Broadway
(David Shayne declaring that “I’m an artist, … but first I’m a human being”
⁴
). As in those films, however,
Annie Hall’s
critique of the contrivances of art contains a significant equivocation. For many in the film’s audience, it was common knowledge that the Sunny/Arty couple bears an intriguingly similar relationship to Annie/Alvy as Annie/Alvy does to Diane Keaton/Woody Allen, whose romance and breakup the film was widely recognized as fictionalizing. The
roman a clef
aspect of
Annie Hall adds
yet another layer of art/life ambiguity to the movie, reminding the attentive viewer that, for all its pretensions to documentary veracity,
Annie Hall
too is aesthetic artifice, another creator’s deliberately fabricated effort to “get things to come out perfect in art.”

Alvy’s delivery of this line directly to the camera is what makes the scene so likable; clearly, the film’s repeated pattern of such spontaneous soliloquies accounts for the fact that
Annie Hall
remains for many viewers Allen’s most appealing film. Alvy, this self-deprecating assessment of his art invites viewers to believe, is leveling with us, and when he isn’t actually addressing the audience, the film contains other devices (the subtitles which reveal what Annie and Alvy are actually thinking while they’re engaging in seductive getting-to-know-you small talk, for instance, or the split-screen projection of the two discussing their divergent perceptions of their relationship with their analysts) which extend and reinforce
Annie Hall’s
winsome ethos of plain-dealing and ingenuousness. The paradox of
Annie Hall,
of course, is that the devices that allow the audience access to the reality underlying appearances in the film are themselves highly self-conscious artifices, artistic contrivances masquerading as vehicles of representational authenticity and veracity.

In his review of Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography,
The Magic Lantern,
Allen suggests one possible source for the self-conscious cinematic devices of
Annie Hall:
in the
Passion of Anna,
Allen wrote, Bergman “had the chutzpah to stop the engrossing story at intervals and let the actors explain to the audience what they are trying to do with their portrayals,” such moments constituting for him “showmanship at its best.”
⁵
Whether Allen derived
Annie Hall’
s illusion-dispersing devices from Bergman’s film, from Theater of the Absurd dramatists such as Pirandello or Ionesco, from Brechtian theatrical alienation techniques, or from Groucho Marx’s mischievous addressing of the film audience throughout
Horse Feathers
matters less than their effect. That effect is to undermine the film’s representationality while establishing a visual approximation of Alvy’s subjective reality, which is, contradictorily, more “real” than the one it displaces. Because these devices partake of and embody Allen’s ambivalence toward artistic representation, constituting cinematic convergences of verisimilitude with falsification, they will be the focus in this chapter’s discussion of
Annie Hall
.

Peter Cowie characterizes these devices as “visual inventions”
⁶
and Annette Wernblad describes them as “unusual technical and narrative devices”
⁷
; because of their mimesis-suspending tendencies and illustrative nature, they can be designated antimimetic emblems. Some of these devices are admittedly—and very significantly—indistinguishable from jokes, and might, consequently, be perceived as the earliest moments in Allen’s career in which comedian and artist converge. When Alvy Singer, age forty plus, appears in a second grade classroom among his classmates, defending his lack of a latency period in childhood and inviting them to describe for the movie audience their adult occupations (e.g., “I used to be a heroin addict,” one boy explains, “Now I’m a methadone addict”) and interests (“I’m into leather,” another confesses [p. 8]), the comic effect is immediate and relatively uncomplicated.
⁸
The conventions of cinematic realism have been suspended here not only for the straightforward purposes of humor, but also to emblematize visually the point Alvy’s mother will make about him in the scene’s concluding line: “You never could get along with anyone at school. You were always outta step with the world” (p. 9).