Annie Hall (1977)
Written by Woody Allen & Marshall Brickman. Directed by Woody Allen.

La De Da: Annie Hall as Divine Tragicomedy

By Eric David, MA Film Production

"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. It even beat Star Wars for Best Picture in 1977.

Allen's breakthrough 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 than Allen. At the same time, he is the least believing of his brethren, flaunting his atheism 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's stated goal in filming Crimes and Misdemeanors was "I just wanted to illustrate, in an entertaining way, that there's no God." Allen even wrote a one-act play "God," about when the ancient Greeks first tried a deus ex machina, but the new machine kills the actor playing Zeus, leaving the playwright to mourn, "God is dead."

Yet, as Richard Shickel put it, "Woody's atheism has always been of the disappointed kind." 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 some ways, he is like the author of that most postmodern of Biblical books, Ecclesiastes. And in his recurring failed relationships, one hears 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 New York 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 sourpuss savior.

Divine Humor

"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 ironic smile and nod. Similarly, Allen has shifted in Annie Hall from his earlier gag-driven movies to a more character-centric humor. As he said to himself, "I think I'll try and make some 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 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 Bible 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, 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 the pompous loudmouth; or there's that crack about the Maharishi: "look, there's God coming outta the men's room."

But, Trueblood reminds us, 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. 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."

But in the end, the rest is silence. 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 jazz playing over B&W 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). Maybe we also hear the silence of God that Allen's cinematic mentor Bergman lamented so oft. The mood leaving the theater 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.

Eric David (M.A. Film Production, USC) has an essay in the current Mars Hill Review and runs the Secular Film Series at Brentwood Presbyterian Church. www.ericdavid.info