"D' ju see 'Annie Hall'?" (review)
Pinsker, Sanford
D ju see 'Annie Hall'?" A Review by Sanford Pinsker First the soda machine nhpritzes; then it releases its cup. Nothing characterizes urban, middle-class life more than constant, low-grade...
...In this sense, Annie Hall shares many of the concerns of earlier Woody Allen films...
...The seventies, of course, belong to Annie Hall...
...In the case of Woody Allen, nothing expresses his ambivalence towards normalcy—or...
...Woody Allen has an uncanny sense of the cultural context in which human relationships happen...
...As it turns out...
...It seems they needed the eggs...
...He attracts women despite—or perhaps because til"—his singularly non-macho, even egg-headed approach...
...Eastern peddlers...
...But there is another aspect of this iLumatic change worth mentioning now...
...In those days everything conspired to terrify the young Alvy—his parents' shaking house (built directly beneath the roller-coaster at Coney Island), repressive teachers, the universe itself...
...He may be the first to make a career of exploring the cosmic disposar s) stem with such manic irrtensit Wistfu about among the pipes, a master theoplumber whose only confusion is whether or not our life is a celestial snicker or a knee-slapper...
...Annie Hall has been likened to Felhni's 81/2, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...
...Woody Allen is not only more bookish, but more given to metaphysical brooding...
...it is where the world is divided between those who grab for the sugar at Nedick's and those who get knocked off their stools in the process...
...Why worry...
...Woody Allen is hardly the first person to observe that "Man proposes, but God disposes...
...When echoes of Borsht Belt humor do appear (as, for example, in the opening joke of Annie Hall about the resort which served lousy food—and in such small portions...
...There are the same nervous obsessions, the same Quixotic responses to the world's stimuli...
...and laces Yiddish idioms into his incongruous, parodic speech...
...The world is always and too much with him, crowded with "authorities" {parental, rabbinic, professorial) who tsk-tsk over his diverse ineptitudes and giggle at his bespectacled, bemused face...
...It is a delicious exercise in fantasized oneSanford Pinsker, whose work appeared in moment last month, is Associate Professor of English at Franklin and Marshall College...
...As Heinrich Heine put it, "I cannot relate my own griefs without the thing becoming comic...
...he makes a comic mess of bolh— sneezing up clouds of expensive dust and turning a rental car parking lot into an extension of his father's dodge-em ride...
...Why be paranoid...
...Like innocence, one can protest about schlemiel-hood too much...
...Los Angeles is still worse...
...But as Alvy Singer keeps insisting: "I can't live ih a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light...
...In Woody Allen's case it threatened to become a stock response, an affectation, a way of holding the Real Goods at an arm's length...
...Perhaps this admittedly thumbnail sketch will explain something of why Woody Allen is a more complex study in authentically Jewish humor than, ay, Mel Brooks, the filmmaker th whom he is often—and I might add, unjustifiably— eoftu>ared...
...And, as Alvy Singer comes to realize, an unthreatened life is not worth living...
...When Alvy Singer (Woody Allen's nom du cinema) can no longer endure the pretentious boor (who, as it turns out, teaches courses in "media" at Columbia), he deflates him, first by directly appealing to the audience and then by dragging out no less an "authority" on hot and cold media than Marshall McLuhan from behind a lobby billboard...
...There was a time when his brother thought he was a chicken...
...But that is to confuse the issue at hand...
...And Woody Allen, whose lineage includes Chaplin's "little tramp," the schlemiet of Yiddish theatre, bits of Everyman and pieces of .lob, belongs definitively to the latter group...
...they are the building blocks of a larger philosophical point...
...At one point in Annie Hall, the irritations I spoke about earlier (in this case, enduring long lines at a movie theatre) are compounded by a film-buff who is glibly holding forth about Fellini...
...For those American Jews weaned on dialect jokes and stage Yiddish, Woody Alien serves as a gentle reminder that "serious humor" need not be a contradiction in terms...
...New York, of course, is a condition as much as a place...
...I also suspect that they would not be nearly as funny as those employed by Allen/Singer...
...And not without good reason, because Annie Hall is an extended reflection on and/or reconstruction of Alvy Singer's past...
...He might have been talking for—and about—Woody Allen...
...And, of course, those idyllic moments when a girl like Annie Hall makes New York City a heautiful, exciting place to live...
...for that matter, towards the Jewish condition— better than the remarks which conclude Alvy Singer's monologue...
...His humor is not "political" and he would rather watch the New York Knicks than drop names...
...But that much said, let me hasten to add that Woody Allen has deeply ambivalent attitudes about much of what passes, these days, for seriousness—and this includes the kinds of double-talk that generate from our universities...
...The three women in Alvy Singer's life (two ex-wives, one ex-mistress) are barometers of our country's changing attitudes...
...Nothing about Alvy's amusement park boyhood—including the bumper car concession his father operated—seemed very amusing...
...Annie Hall's brother is more than half in love with an easeful, Romantic death (in his case, via a spectacular car crash) and Alvy imagines that Annie's silent, disapproving 'Grammie" is an anti-Semite who sees him dressed in Hassidic garb, complete with ear-locks...
...becomes "Did Jew eat...
...Like Woody Allen, he is a successful comic, forty-years-old and nearly at the end of his psychiatric rope...
...What rolled them in the aisles at Grossinger's now packs movie theatres in Dubuque...
...With God's help Tevye the Dairyman starved to death...
...with America's help his grandchildren moved to New Rochelle...
...For better or worse, Alvy Singer is a man trapped within a set of moral imperatives from which he cannot escape...
...Ontological doubts merge with the gritty surfaces of paranoia: books with the word "death" in their title become especial favorites...
...Diane Keaton's comic flair—a matter of affecting gestures and a slightly dizzy way of apprehending the world's complexities— provides a perfect foil to Woody Allen's cerebral brooding and nervous tics...
...But the lovable schlemiel who bumbled his way through Play It Again, Sam or Love and Death has been replaced by a more successful— albeit, paranoid—counterpart...
...He itemizes humiliation and failure ;ts if it were his mission to collect evidence of the world's absurdity and lack of justice, to unmask the old terrors that lurk behind the new freedoms...
...Eric Segal notwithstanding, real love affairs involve more than never making apologies: very often there are running spats, separations, strained reunions, final breaks...
...That, as much as anything, is what it means to be Jewish...
...upsmanship, in Woody Allen's continuing efforts at Getting Even (the title of his first collection of essays) with a wide range of cultural antagonists...
...On the other hand, much of what passes for American-Jewish humor has been bent upon vulgarizing the richness of an older, usually Yiddish-speaking, culture...
...In a word, Annie Hall is the shiksa that nice-Jewish-boys like Alvy Singer dream about...
...Annie Hall is his stand-up monologue about a life spent on various analysts' couches...
...His books include The Schlemiel as Metaphor, and An Essay on the Fiction of Philip Roth...
...California WASP...
...It is, to be sure, an oft-told scenario, as old as Abie's Irish Rose or as recent as the latest novel by Philip Roth...
...But the humor retains its "Oi vey, my son the doctor is drowning" quality...
...To be a Jew," Alfred Kazin pronounces solemnly, "meant that one's very right to existence was always being brought into question...
...After all, Alvy Singer's comic tzores are inextricably bound to his relationship with Annie Hall, the figure in Woody Allen's autobiographical carpet who gives the film its title and its raison d'etre...
...Such is the stuff of which Woody Allen films are made...
...A psychiatrist told the family that he could cure the boy of his delusion, but they refused...
...Like other graduates from, the Borsht Belt School of Cornfedy, Brooks^fe'esan as tuitfler) a j/mVf^maker, who later irSteTOrmexTtW Zany energy into a serties o/hkhh/successful m^es^boup^iovies: Blazing S^dl/sSlkwnftiFrankensU'm, Silent Movie...
...In effect, he gives the old "oi vey" punchline a philosophical twist...
...Alvy Singer is not a whining cardboard Failure...
...that would make Simon Wiesen-thal blush...
...Unfortunately, it also requires that one walk through the world with rose-colored glasses securely fastened...
...There, the culture is laid-back and funky...
...The confessional ends, as it must, with a very significant joke...
...And, so, Mel Brooks paints himself in red-face (there was a time when Jewish entertainers hid behind burnt cork...
...High Camp and Midwestern corn—pastoral, uncomplicated, ahistorical—and a welcome change from sentences that begin with "oi vey...
...He is, in short, a cosmic comedian, an expert in the art of giving existential sadness an ironic, self-deprecating twist...
...for Woody Allen, it is a steady diet...
...Annie Hall has changed all that...
...Later, Alvy Singer develops that peculiarly Jewish talent for sniffing out disaster into fullscale comic performances...
...No doubt Alvy Singer would agree, although I suspect that Professor Kazin has other, less neurotic, courses of action in mind...
...Annie Hall is less about how it feels to never get the girl than how it hurts when you "lose" her...
...And, in the transformation, Woody Allen has shown that he can structure a film in ways that blend the brilliance of individual scenes with an overarching artistic vision...
...It begins with Groucho Marx's famous quip about refusing to join any club that would have him (a remark, by the way, which Alvy Singer insists appeared originally in Freud's Wit and the Unconscious) and then moves through a straight-faced, ersatz lecture on his lifelong fears about death, complete with sepia-tinged flashbacks to his Brooklyn childhood...
...But, this time, the "love story" is allowed to develop in ways that avoid the traps of bitterness (Heartbreak Kid) and those of melodramatic piety (Cynthia Freeman's A World Full of Strangers...
...And the jokes they prefer spring partly from embarrassment, partly from a misplaced sense of nostalgia...
...Tolstoy's remark about happy families applies with an equal force to well-adjusted Jews— namely, they make poor candidates for novels and even poorer ones for films...
...Unfortunately...
...The rest of us taste aggrava-lion...
...He also discovers that there are shadings of Grant Wood's "American Gothic" behind every Norman Rockwell painting...
...Nor can he live in a city where the only cultural dilemma is where one can score some coke...
...Alvy Singer,belongs in neither world...
...he watches Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity (a documentary about France during the Nazi occupation) with the com-pulsiveness of a guilt-ridden survivor, dabbles in conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination and boasts an ear for anti-Semitic remarks ("D'ju eat...
...It is, at one and the same time...
...Her motto is "La-Di-Da," a tag-line that rings of fishin" holes and hayrides and roughly translates as "So what...
...His angst is writ grotesquely large, his track record studded with defeats...
...As a Diane Keaton played larger-than-life...
...Presumably, nobody says "La-di-da," but it comes to much the same thing...
...Annie Hall is everything that Alvy Singer is not: spontaneous, unafraid, empty-headed, a charming extrovert, the ultimate WASP...
...he is a three-dimensional, fully vulnerable human being...
...The fifties are represented by a "Madly for Ad-liii" liberal who speaks softly and tames an efficient clipboard, the sixties by an aspiring writer trying to rub her elbows into the New York Intellectual crowd...
...The result is a life in which Fear and Trembling are no longer floating episodes but constant companions of the comic vision, life's bottom line...
...At the same time, however, the press of History need not be a crushing weight or an occasion for freewheeling paranoia...
...The result is a candor which drives more deeply into Woody Allen's autobiography than his comic persona as the sensitive flop ever could...
...Simply unbutton your shirt, buy a pendant, learn to eat alfalfa sprouts and even a New York Jew can pass for a sun-lanned...
...This, of course, is the face that Jewish paranoia wears: if anything, the anti-Semitic "Grammie" is likely to think of Jews as fast-talking...
...Such perceptions and preoccupations have a decidedly Jewish nng about them, albeit one cre-ilcntialed less by the revelations of Torah than by the harsher facts of marginality and alienation...
...Nothing characterizes urban, middle-class life more than constant, low-grade irritations, the kind that lead directly to inadequacy, to feeling ragged-out...
...What gets lost in the translation, however, is that ineluctable relationship between a Messianic faith in the world's perfectability and an equally strong conviction that the waiting period is likely to be a very long one indeed...
...As I suggested earlier, Alvy Singer is not the sexual schlemiel wc associate with earlier Woody Allen films...
Vol. 3 • November 1977 • No. 1
