The Story of Annie Hall - Essay Example

Annie Hall The story of Annie Hall revolves around the relationship of Jewish comedy Alvy played by Woody Allen and WASP singer Annie played by Diane Keaton. Alvy has been twice divorced and knows how difficult it is to find a good partner among pretentious New Yorkers. Annie is different from other women and gets along very well with Alvy. Everything seems to be going right, yet the relationship ends on a note of inevitability when Annie decides to leave for Los Angeles in order to find fame. This is the tragic element about it, because despite so many things being right, the relationship still ends and life goes on, just as usual. The break-up comes because Annie moves to Los Angeles to discover herself and finds a new life there, and Alvy is unable to accept her as a person in her own right, with her own unique tastes and ideas. While the film presents some beautiful and tender moments between the couple, these are set against a contextual backdrop that suggests a breakup. The film commences on a nostalgic note, where Alvy is thinking about his relationship with Annie, the relationship that almost was. He muses, “I keep sifting through the pieces of the relationship through my mind, and examining my life and trying to figure out where did the screw up come?” (Annie Hall). Yet, this nostalgia is also intertwined with an underlying element of cynicism, because we know at the outset what the outcome of the relationship was – it ended in a break-up. Revealing the outcome at the very beginning of the film helps to set the foreground of the narrative and direct the conception of the audience towards the meaning of the film.(Schatz, 1982). It sets up the central question to be addressed in the film – why did the relationship between Annie and Alvy end? The nostalgic question posed by Alvy at the very beginning of the film is followed by a stand up comedy routine, adopting an ironic, self reflexive tone that successfully reflects a combination of nostalgia and cynicism. One of the means employed in the film to distinguish the relationship of Alvy and Annie from the rest of the events occurring in the film is through the use of contrasts. An associative, metaphorical sequencing through stand up comedy segments is used at the beginning of the film, whereas a conventional, sequential narrative structure is used for the scenes dealing with Annie and Alvy’s meeting and courtship.(Schatz, 1982). But as soon as the relationship begins to disintegrate, the sequential narrative structure also begins to break up. While the phases of the film dealing with the courtship between Alvy and Annie reveal Alvy functioning with a sustained lack of self consciousness, other parts of the film where there is disharmony and break up of the two protagonists are again characterized by ironic voice over narrations, flashbacks and character asides directed at the camera, all of which breakup the sequential narration. Thus, while the film portrays the inevitable necessity of relationships, examining the process of communication and interaction between two human beings, there is also an underlying element of cynicism that runs throughout the film in the form of Alvy’s self conscious alienation, made evident in the narrative form that is used in the film. This is one of the crucial themes of the film; the presentation of both the necessity as well as the absurdity of love. On the one hand, the scenes of meeting and courtship are awkward yet sweet and the two characters appear to vibe well with each other; yet on the other hand, they are doomed to separation. Thus aspect is portrayed especially well through the play devised by the protagonist Alvy, which deals with the relationship between himself and Annie. In this play, Alvy follows Annie to Los Angeles and even proposes to her and she accepts. This is Alvy’s version of it, a romanticized version that he, as narrator, imposes on the narrative format, as if to test it out and see how well it fits. The reality however is quite different, since Alvy does indeed follow Annie to Los Angeles and ask her to marry him. But she refuses, on the grounds that she would rather stay friends than risk entering into marital turmoil. In the film, Alvy presents his version of the play, then turns around and asks the audience: “What can I say? It was my first play.” (Annie Hall). The manipulation of the actual reality to present his own romanticized version is an expression of the nostalgic element in Alvy’s memories, but by the end of the film, Alvy has characterized relationships as “totally irrational and absurd”,(Annie Hall) thereby revealing his own inner cynicism about them. The exploration of other relationships in the film is also a part of the expression of cynicism in the film, because these are all means that Alvy uses to try and explain why his relationships never seem to work. The sequences dealing with his childhood, where his mother takes him to the psychiatrist for worrying about the universe and allowing it to affect his normal life, present a cynical view of the narrator’s ability to enter into normal relationships, because he is so weird himself. The sequences dealing with his previous relationships and Annie’s string of casual partners appear to present a background context that suggests an inevitable breakup because both the characters are unstable and have been unable to sustain lasting relationships. Another significant cinematic technique used in the film Annie Hall is the stand up comedy routine. The jokes in the film are themselves intended to portray deep, subconscious thoughts and feelings. According to Freud, jokes function like dreams because they allow a forum for the expression of disagreeable thoughts and wishes that generally are not allow to enter into the stream of conscious thought.(Girgus, 1993: 123). In the film, dreams and jokes are intertwined, in presenting the underlying problems existing between the couple, which they find it difficult to face up to but which lay the ground for the inevitable break-up. One example of this is the narration of Annie’s dream, in which she dreamt that Frank Sinatra was holding his pillow across her face so that she couldn’t breathe (Girgus, 1993: 123). In the dream, Annie breaks Sinatra’s glasses. Since the real Frank Sinatra does not wear glasses, the dream represents Annie’s underlying feeling that Alvy is suppressing her or stopping her from pursuing her dreams and finding herself – “suffocating” her, as Alvy queries. But even as he asks Annie whether her dream means that he’s suffocating her, Alvy chooses to adopt yet another subconscious stream of action. He passes off the event with a joke about Annie’s desire to castrate the singer in her dream, thereby indicating his own inner feelings that Annie is may be trying to dominate him and attack his masculinity. Such elements weave a strong element of cynicism into the film, because all these underlying signs and symbols present a complex subtext of meaning, dramatizing the tension between the meaning that is explicit in the outward interaction of the couple as opposed to what may actually be going on within their minds and hearts. In one scene of the film, after Annie and Alvy break up for the first time, Alvy is having sex with another woman but is summoned to Annie’s apartment on the plea that he needs to kill a spider. When he arrives at the apartment, it is only to discover how much Annie needs him. Such scenes highlight the emotion existing between the couple and it is this closeness that Alvy is nostalgic about as he formulates his play with a different ending to what actually happened in Los Angeles when he asked Annie to marry him. Other elements of nostalgia are also evident in the film are the scenic locales and backdrops against which the courtship of Annie and Alvy plays out. These scenes are filmed against shots of the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset, the passing of the seasons as depicted in the floral background at Central Park. Yet these are also interspersed with comedic elements that have an underlying suggestion of cynicism when juxtaposed with filmic cuts, where the screen is split into different scenes that are happening at the same time, or when the dialogue is supplemented with subtitles that show the contrast between what the character is thinking and what s/he is saying. Against the unfolding of the relationship of Alvy and Annie, stereotypes of race are also presented, thereby once again suggesting cynically that the relationship may not last. The split screen technique is used to demonstrate the differences between Alvy’s Jewish background as compared to Annie’s WASP background. Alvy’s sensitivity about the issue of race and his Jewish background and the scenes that show how he is unable to get along well with Annie’s WASP family, cynically suggest that the couple may not be headed for a happily-ever-after, because there are fundamental differences between them. The film also shows Annie and Alvy quarreling even before their first kiss, a kiss that Alvy dismisses as something which needed to be got out of the way. This further highlights the elements of potential conflict, underlined by a stranger’s advice to Alvy when questioned about why the relationship died out. “It’s never something you did. That’s how people are. Love fades.” (Annie Hall). This places the responsibility for the break up of the relationship as something which is outside the control of either of the two protagonists, it’s just something which inevitably happens. (Knight, 2004). Thus, even as the tender, romantic moments between Alvy and Annie are being presented on screen, the audience is always aware of the cynical context within which this love has unfolded, the inevitability of break up of this couple, in the same manner as the breakup of both Alvy’s and Annie’s earlier relationships. Knight(2004) has argued that the film Annie Hall does not present a true picture of relationships at all, because it represents an imposition of meaning upon women by men. He points out how Annie and Alvy’s approaches to the relationship differ – Annie wants to be with a good man after being with what she characterizes as a lot of jerks, but Alvy views her in a purely sexual context. This is followed by the adoption of a Pygmalion like role by Alvy wherein he tries to impose his own tastes on her. According to Knight(2004), the relationship between Alvy and Annie ends because Alvy is lost in his own neuroses and is unable to accept Annie’s otherness, let alone value her for it. He is thus unable to accept his share of the responsibility for the breakup of the relationship and chooses to blame it on extraneous factors, such as the irrational nature of relationships. When his reminiscences of the happiness and sadness of his relationship with Annie end, Allen arrives at a resolution with yet another joke about a man who complains to his psychiatrist that his brother is crazy and thinks he’s a chicken. When the doctor advises him to turn his brother in, the man replies: “I would but I need the eggs.” Alvy applies this in explaining what he thinks of relationships: “You know they’re totally irrational and absurd and….but I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.” This only underscores the Alvy’s inner cynicism; his idea of love differs from Annie’s but he is unable to accept his share of responsibility for the breakup, choosing to present his reminiscence of the relationship against an underlying backdrop of cynicism where the break up is inevitable. References: * Girgus, Sam, 1993. “Desire and narrativity in Annie Hall”, The Explicator, 51(2): 122-125 * Knight, Christopher, J, 2004. “Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: Galatea’s triumph over Pygmalion”, Literature/Film Quarterly”, 32(3): 213-222 * Schatz, Thomas, 1982. “Annie Hall and the issue of modernism”, Literature/Film Quarterly, 10(3): 180-188 Read More