The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (8 page)

Equally funny is Alvy’s producing Marshall McLuhan from behind a billboard at the New Yorker theater to refute a pompous Columbia professor’s self-congratulatory disquisition upon McLuhan’s work, but the scene’s culminating line—Alvy’s apostrophe to the audience, “Boy, if life could only be like this!”—also introduces a subtextual theme that
Annie
Hall consistently elaborates. It begins with Alvy’s oblique explanation for the non-linear structure of
Annie Hall
in his admission that “I have a hyperactive imagination. My mind tends to jump around a little, and I have some trouble between fantasy and reality” (p. 6). The theme culminates in his apology for the disjunction between reality and art in his play, which serves as prelude to his closing one-liner suggesting that we keep pursuing romantic relationships because of our need for the illusory eggs they provide. The connection is clear: only in artistic wish-fulfillment is Marshall McLuhan available to serve our yearnings for revenge against the outrages reality inflicts; only in fantasy do relationships provide the eggs we crave. The disparity between mental projections of reality and actuality is the pedal chord of
Annie Hall,
and its antimimetic emblems are the notes comprising that chord.

Annie Hall
is, of course, permeated with antimimetic emblems like McLuhan’s magical appearance, scenes in which realistic cinematic rendering is sacrificed to the expression of a different sort of truth. Alvy’s recurrent addressing of the camera/audience is another such device, as is the cartoon in which Annie is depicted as the wicked witch from
Snow White
, her evil nature exacerbated by the onset of PMS. Alvy’s amusing conversations on the street with complete strangers knowledgeable about his personal problems, his metamorphosis into a Hassidic rabbi at Annie’s family’s Easter dinner, the Hall and Singer families conversing over their Easter dinners across a split screen are further examples of these emblems. Such self-reflexive cinematic devices in
Annie Hall
constitute ingenious filmic means of dramatizing the difference between surface and substance, visual emblems incessantly distilling the distinction between the world mentally constructed and reality. As Graham McCann has argued, these devices reflect Allen’s desire to “capture in images the variety of impressions and subjectivity of interpretations one experiences in the mind.”
⁹
The irony of such scenes is that they distort the surface cinematic reality of a situation (Alvy and Annie’s conversational sparring over the aesthetics of photography) in order to express its underlying reality (the subtitles manifesting the truth that they’re scrutinizing each other as prospective sexual partners). Although the evolution of
Annie Hall
is too complicated to be understood in such neatly linear terms, these antimimetic emblems can be seen as the transitional tools of Allen’s transformation of himself into a serious filmmaker, allowing him to transcend the movie and literary parodies of
Sleeper
and
Love and Death
with a form of comedic satire that explores the psychic and emotional sources of film and novelistic illusions.

Allen’s ability to address with dramatic effectiveness the disparity between human perception or desire and reality is, more than anything else, the element of his work responsible for its having become more substantial than—to choose the most obvious and oft-cited contrast—the films of Mel Brooks, which generally settle for the parodying of literary and cinematic forms without exploring the psychic needs served by the forms being parodied. Brilliant as it is as film satire, Brooks’s
Young Frankenstein
—probably his best film—seeks to displace
Frankenstein
through humor rather than seeking to illuminate the human desire that the original horror film addressed; it’s Allen’s examination of the needs that art is fulfilling for its audience which most emphatically differentiates his films from Brooks’s.
¹⁰
Comedy, it can be argued, is
always
about the difference between what we think the world is and its actuality; what distinguishes
Annie Hall
from Allen’s earlier comic films as well as from Brooks’s is that its visual emblems evoke not only the difference between fantasy and reality, but they also dramatize the emotional cost to the perceiver of the awareness of that disparity. Rather than—as Brooks characteristically does—objectifying his protagonist in order to make him an easy target for laughter, these devices draw the viewer inside Alvy so that his emotional landscape becomes the viewer’s as well. Cinematic correlatives of the theatrical soliloquy, the antimimetic emblems of
Annie Hall
simultaneously provide Allen’s film with a quirky mode of humor, heighten the movie’s aura of plain-dealing candor through their incessant transgression of cinematic conventions of representation, and entertainingly project the subjective reality of Alvy Singer. In their contradictory repudiation and enactment of artistic contrivance, they are the perfect artifices to inaugurate the serious filmmaking career of an artist irremediably suspicious of art.
¹¹

It’s amusing, for example, that at the end of the film, Alvy’s complaint about missing Annie elicits from a random pedestrian the fact that she is living with Tony Lacey (Paul Simon) in L.A., but underlying its humor is an effective dramatization of a preoccupation with Annie so overwhelming that Alvy imagines everyone on the streets of New York is acquainted with the details of their relationship.
¹²
Still more humorously affecting is the dramatization of Alvy’s irrepressible need to articulate his problems with women as being so acute that he must unburden himself of them to a horse on which a mounted policeman sits. Even when his spirits are up, as they are when he and Annie have briefly reunited, Alvy’s interior landscape gravitates toward admonitions and dire predictions anticipating the Cassandrean anxieties incessantly expressed by the chorus in
Mighty Aphrodite
. The visit to Alvy’s Brooklyn childhood by Annie, Alvy, and Rob (Tony Roberts) culminates in Alvy’s Aunt Tessie’s assurances that she was a “great beauty,” Alvy’s mother affirming, “When she was younger, they all wanted to marry Tessie” (p. 74). That Tessie is no “great beauty” at this moment in Alvy’s childhood is what Alvy is reminding himself of in revisiting the scene, the time having come for her (as it will for him) when “they” all no longer want to marry her. In the debate he is conducting with himself, which is the scene’s subtext and stimulus, Alvy is worrying that if he doesn’t marry Annie while she is pressuring him to make the commitment, before he knows it he’ll be talking about his attractiveness to women in the past tense.

These privileged glimpses into Alvy’s subjectivity don’t convey truths solely about him. When, during the Easter dinner at Annie’s, Alvy assures the film audience how different his family was from hers, the abruptly emerging split-screen dramatization of his point comically visualizes the contrast between them. The Halls’ well-bred, WASPishly disinterested conversation about “swap meets and boat basins” contends with the antagonistic, emotionally intense dinner talk of the Singers, their conversation endlessly preoccupied with illnesses and other familial examples of human frailty and extremity. The Halls seem to prevail in the first round of the debate between families, which ensues when their dialogue between them across the split screen prompts Alvy’s father (Mordecai Lawner) to admit to Mom Hall (Colleen Dewhurst) that he doesn’t know what sins his family is seeking to atone for in fasting on the Easter holiday. However, there is another round.

After dinner, Annie’s brother, Duane (Christopher Walken), invites Alvy into his room and confesses the morbidly masochistic fantasies he experiences while driving, his desire to precipitate an apocalyptic crash causing his own and others’ annihilation. The pan shot through the windshield of Duane’s MG which follows—Duane intently driving, Annie complacently watching the road, Alvy’s face frozen in abject terror—is one of Allen’s great comic triumphs; it tacitly represents a triumph for Alvy’s family as well. If the Halls’ dinner conversation weren’t quite so bloodlessly civilized or were concerned with issues more substantial than swap meets and boat basins—if it acknowledged some of the darker realities of existence on which the Singers’ communication seems so extravagantly fixated—Duane might be less subject to the development of a symptomatic neurosis spawned in part by his admission of such actualities to consciousness only in the privacy of his fantasies. (Had Alvy’s family not been quite so combative over dinner, of course, his personality, “which is a little nervous, I think” [p. 6], would probably have benefitted as well.) The visual joke created by the pan across Duane’s windshield isn’t completely dependent upon the contextualizing effect of the split-screen device, but the laugh goes deeper if the viewer recognizes the extent to which this vignette cleverly reconfigures the film’s thematic organizing conflict of fantasy and reality, the Halls’ utter repudiation of actuality compensatorily tempting Duane to transform the oppressively civilized ordinary into the shape of his morbid fantasies. Alvy’s father can’t think of what sins his family is attempting to atone for by fasting; the Halls’ Easter dinner scene dramatizes the familial sin for which Duane is unconsciously atoning: the denial of reality.

Of course, the denial of reality is also what Alvy’s play is about. His acknowledgment of the desire to create art which deliberately attempts to improve aesthetically on the material that actuality has offered him introduces a conflict that pervades numerous Allen films, one reflected both in the choices his artist characters make and in the range of movies he has himself produced. Although
Annie Hall
does not end on the note of romantic reconciliation which is Alvy’s play’s resolution, the film’s evolution reflects that it underwent a not dissimilar redemption by imposition of aesthetic form. “The whole conception of the picture changed as we were cutting it,” Allen has explained. “It was originally a picture about me exclusively, not about a relationship. It was about me, my life, my thoughts, my ideas, my background, and the relationship was one major part of it. But sometimes it’s hard to see at the outset what’s going to be the most interesting drift.”
¹³
The foregrounding of the Alvy/Annie relationship necessitated the elimination of nearly all of the original script’s most surreal comic flights, which, as Ralph Rosenblum describes them, pushed well past the self-reflexivity of the antimimetic emblems discussed here into bizarre and surreal fantasia. In one deleted scene, Annie, Alvy, and Rob go to Hell, noting its various circles (“Layer Five: organized crime, fascist dictators, and people who don’t appreciate oral sex”) as they descend
¹⁴
; in another, Alvy and the
Rolling Stone
reporter (Shelley Duvall) visit the Garden of Eden and discuss the female orgasm with God; Alvy plays basketball against the New York Knicks on a team comprised of Kafka, Kierkegaard, Nietszche, and other literary giants
¹⁵
; Alvy and Annie reenact
The Night of the Living Dead
with a podded Rob in Beverly Hills.
¹⁶

The disparity between the script which contained all these comedic excesses and the relatively tempered and coherent screenplay printed in
Four Films of Woody Allen
is both huge and hugely instructive. That disjunction becomes more striking when we consider another of Allen’s characterizations of
Annie Hall’s
evolution: “I said to myself,” Allen recalled to Stig Bjorkman, “’I think I will try and make some deeper film and not be as funny in the same way [as in
Sleeper
and
Love
and
Death
]. And maybe there will be other values that will emerge, that will be interesting or nourishing for the audience’.”
¹⁷
The transformation of this project from a comic script which would accommodate every kind of extravagant
shtick
Allen and Marshall Brickman could devise to the comparatively restrained and orderly retrospective narrative of
Annie Hall contains
within it the first stage of the transformation of Woody Allen from comic to serious film director.
¹⁸
Those antimimetic emblems considered insufficiently extreme to tear the film’s realistic surface apart remain in the text and constitute the initial effective convergences of comedian and artist, exemplifying the first fully effective cinematic conciliations of Allen’s conflicting desires to entertain and illuminate which continue to animate his movies. What that script also contains in the two endings projected by Arty and Alvy is the expression of a related ambivalence which has similarly pervaded Allen’s entire filmmaking career: his conflict between “tryin’ to get things to come out perfect in art” by making movies which reach gratifying resolutions, and making movies which close in the ungratifying but realistic irresolution of the ending of
Annie Hall
.