Retrospective: Annie Hall (1977)

La De Da: Annie Hall as Divine Tragicomedy

It Had To Be You

"There is in magic some sense of the religious or some sense of there's hope
for something other than what we know as real . my way has been movies."

Subtitled "a nervous romance," Annie Hall rides Alvy Singer's
stream-of-consciousness as he relives his failed romance with the title
character. The film is replete with stylistic innovations: fractured
narrative, flashbacks, flash-forwards, internal monologue, breaking the
fourth wall, split-screen, double exposure, subtitles, even animation. Most
surprisingly, it beat Star Wars for Best Picture in 1977.

Allen's breakthrough also marks the high point of his Diane Keaton period,
before the subsequent Mia Farrow period of average, and current Soon-Yi
period of below-average films (although the buzz on his 36th film, Match
Point, indicates a possible comeback).

Most appropriate to this festival, Allen's preference for the Big Apple over
the City of the Angels is in full force. It occurs throughout his work, most
for the former in Manhattan, most against the latter in Hollywood Ending,
but Annie Hall strikes the balance. The shot of palm trees as "God Rest Ye
Merry, Gentlemen" plays is the perfect visual expression of our city of
rights on red, beautiful women, great meetings, canned laughter, forgotten
mantras, and alfalfa sprouts with mashed yeast.

A Real Jew

"To you I'm an atheist; to God I'm the Loyal Opposition."

Among Jewish comedians, from the Marxes, Berle, Benny and Burns to Brooks,
Dangerfield, Kaufman and Seinfeld, none makes so much of his Jewishness as
Allen. At the same time, he is the least believing of his brethren,
flaunting his atheism in his early stand-up routines with transplendid quips
like "Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday," "How
can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the
roller of an electric typewriter?" and "If only God would give me some clear
sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank."

Allen stated, when filming Crimes and Misdemeanors, that he "just wanted to
illustrate, in an entertaining way, that there's no God." He even wrote a
one-act play titled simply "God" about when the ancient Greeks first
constructed a deus ex machina, but the new machine kills the actor playing
Zeus, leaving the playwright to mourn: "God is dead." Allen's recurrent
failed relationships, both on and off the screen, are overshadowed by his
greatest failed relationship: with the God of his fathers.

Yet, as Richard Schickel put it, "Woody's atheism has always been of the
disappointed kind." Allen spends a lot of time and energy mocking a God he
says he doesn't believe in. Maybe it's not just shadowboxing; while Allen is
a pessimist, seeing only the horrible and the miserable in our expanding
universe, he also celebrates the good things in life more poignantly than,
say, the Spielbergs of the world. In this way, he is like the author of that
most postmodern of Biblical books, Ecclesiastes, who bemoans that all is
vanity, that all we are is dust in the wind, yet he also finds the world
full of useless beauty. And in Allen's recurrent failed relationships, you
just might hear echoes of Yahweh's on-again, off-again relationship with
Israel, called beloved in one book and harlot in another.

I once stood up in a postmodern church and declared Jesus Christ a Jewish
comedian. My point was partly that we need to be reminded Jesus was Jewish:
his Manhattan and Brooklyn were Jerusalem and Nazareth. Yet if you review
the actors who have played Jesus in films, you'd think he was a SoCal
surfer, not a Hebrew carpenter.

My point was also that Jesus was not always the dour Man of Sorrows depicted
in art history. Interestingly, just before Annie Hall came out, Elton
Trueblood published The Humor of Christ specifically to combat the
stereotype of a sour*** savior.

The Humor of Christ

"If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans."

Trueblood compares today's humor, the gag for its own sake, with the humor
of Christ, which is used to enlighten. Whereas the former results in belly
laughter and guffaws, the latter brings the nod and the ironic smile.
Similarly, Allen has shifted in Annie Hall from his earlier gag-driven
movies to a more character-centric humor. As he said to himself while
writing the film: "I think I'll try and make [a] deeper film and not be as
funny in the same way."

A rare comedy with an unhappy ending, Annie Hall could be compared to one of
Christ's tougher parables about the way the world is, like the Unjust
Steward or the Parable of the Talents. Trueblood interprets these parables
as Christ's lampoons of the current conceptions of God, not as models to
emulate.

Trueblood also says laughter is "often the natural expression of deep pain."
It is only in sharing our sufferings that we make them bearable, and humor
is one way to do this. As Alvy compares Annie to Bathsheba, doubting her
faithfulness, we may recall that Annie Hall was a not-so-fictional depiction
of Allen's real life affair with Keaton and its painful dissolution.

Christ was also a brilliant conversationalist. His banter with the Samaritan
woman at the well has been interpreted by some scholars as flirtation,
especially when one looks at the subtext of the scene (men in the Hebrew
scriptures often met their wives at wells). Alvy's banter with the shiksa on
the roof, where the subtitles reveal what Annie and Alvy are really
thinking, as they drink mediocre wine together (Cana in reverse?), is
another brilliant bit of flirtatious subtext.

Christ often used irony and humor to expose the pompous person (the
Pharisees and priests, Herod, even the disciples). One thinks of Allen's
magic realism when he pulls Marshall McLuhan from behind a movie poster to
deflate a pompous loudmouth in line behind him at the movies; or there's
that wise crack about the Maharishi: "look, there's God coming outta the
men's room."

But the pompous is not just "them." As Christ deflates the pride of those he
confronts, he bursts the corresponding bubble in our own souls, not with
malice, but in play. It is sly, subtle and salvific. William J. Bausch says
Jesus' harder parables "are not meant only to indict. They are meant to
invite." As Trueblood puts it, God's "laughter is directed at our frailties,
but its purpose is to heal . humor is redemptive when it leads to comic
self-discovery."

Seems Like Old Times

"If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the
worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."

Alvy makes the affair have a happy ending in his play, shrugging at how, at
least in art, he can get what he wants; but Allen's ending is not Alvy's.

All of Allen's other credit sequences have lively jazz music playing over
the titles, but for Annie Hall, there is only silence. The story is about
the death of a relationship (a dead shark, as Alvy puts it). Or maybe it's
about the death of another relationship; maybe we also hear the silence of
God that Allen's cinematic mentor Bergman lamented so oft. Or maybe it's a
reference to Hamlet's "the rest is silence," but this is neither tragedy nor
comedy, or rather it's both at once: it's reality. This is how life is. This
is how love is. The mood as we leave the theater and reenter the world is
bittersweet, with no music to lighten it. But we do have one thing:

The final montage in this totally irrational, crazy and absurd romance
points out the importance of memory. Repeatedly the people of Israel are
told to remember their God and their story. Jesus commanded we have
communion in remembrance of him. It is only in remembering Love that we can
hope to fall in It again. In Allen's terms, our God's crazy; he thinks he's
a chicken (Matthew 23:37), and, in the end, we'll keep him: most of us need
the eggs.

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