Woody Allen Week: Annie Hall (1977)

2 years ago

Woody Allen Week: Annie Hall (1977)

THAT WAS THE MOST FUN I’VE EVER HAD WITHOUT LAUGHING.

by Meaghan O’Connell

It has been thirty-three years for him and five for me, but still, my visceral reaction to Woody Allen’s face in the opening credits of Annie Hall is that I want to pull it out of a TigerBeat and fasten it to my closet door with bubble gum. I want to put on Dr. Pepper-flavored chapstick and kiss it while no one’s looking. I fell in love with this movie for the first time on a scratchy, secondhand sofa in the basement of my college dorm with a boy who held my hand just the right way, back when one foot always had to be on the ground after midnight.

I had never seen any movies like this before and when it ended I looked at the boy, bursting. I wanted to establish a new Woody Allen-inspired romantic currency, to replace the Platonic ideal with the Jewish one; I wanted to worship at the altar of black-rimmed glasses and quick wit, to walk along the East River with whoever would have me and be exasperated about my day with a man who put my hair behind my ear with his head cocked just so. I wanted that Woody Allen Head Cock, his chin slightly tucked, brow subtly furrowed, looking droopy and adorable, like his soul had been caught in the rain and love was too weak a word for what he felt.

I needed all of the fucking eggs.

The first time we see Diane Keaton and Woody Allen together— when she’s late for the movie and he tells her he’s just anal and she says, “That’s a polite word for what you are!” my heart leaps out of my chest. We love them so much when they’re fighting, when he’s being crazy and she scolds him and then we cut to them holding each other on the pier and DK has her high-pitched unassured, “Really? Oh, really?” voice and he does the head cock and that right there RUINED US as a nation, romantically speaking, I am convinced, because nothing is more thrilling than Crazy followed by scolding followed by laughter followed by nonsensical declarations of love on city-skyline-backdropped “Really’s” squeaked out of 1978-Diane Keaton in her underwear. Nothing is more beguiling than a cynical, self-loathing, paranoid narcissist who is over the moon for you. Because then you feel like you’ve earned it.

And it is this Woody Allen formula for transcendence in gender relations that inspired women everywhere to search for the sweetness behind the condescension, for the cynical sentimentalist who has been killing spiders, Darling, since he was 30. We want to sit on a bed and grab his arm and say, “Don’t go, please,” and forget for a moment what he said about those adult education courses. And when he says, “Aw, whatsa’ matter?” in his headcocked sincere voice furrowed brow-ness and she says, “I dunno, I just miss you,” and then cries into his mouth, well it’s really just all fucking over because we haven’t learned about the dead shark thing yet and even though he left another woman to come over and even though he yelled at her for subscribing to The National Review, it is the right thing. Because she said what she wanted to say, she said the thing we think of clever ways to dance around or hide in text messages, and then they kissed.

We meet his other women and there is little heart-leaping but we like to watch him perform with them, the way he grabs Alison Porchnik’s shoulder and whistles without looking at her before going on stage; he’s narcissistic but adorable. Like he says, “I’m a bigot, but for the Left.” The other wife is even more intolerable but he delivers the line about quietly humping so pitch perfectly that we could watch him talk to anyone, forever. He is easier to hate without his Chippewa Falls foil, without the “Reallys” to punctuate his brief sentimentalisms. Because as silly as Woody Allen writes her sometimes, Diane Keaton carries the dialogue so wonderfully, in that way we just don’t hear anymore, resplendent with uh’s and oh’s and repetition that makes my brain cheer for her. She’s just got it, even when she doesn’t look right because we won’t let real women into our movies anymore and her hair, let’s face it, is kind of weird. We don’t leave the movie feeling like Annie Hall has made it yet, but she has made it out alive. She knows at least what isn’t good for her.

When I first fell in love with this movie I don’t think I saw that yet. I wasn’t listening when Annie tells Alvy that he is incapable of enjoying life, even though he only repeats the lines in the next scene, “You’re like New York City. You’re just this person, this island unto yourself.” And he is. He is cruel and judgmental and charming and, like Annie says in that same scene, “You know how wonderful you are.” I hadn’t learned yet that that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t believe they didn’t end up together; part of me figured they did, just offstage. In the sequel, perhaps. I put the ending lines up as my away message on AIM. We graduated from college and I spent the summer comforting myself with those white on black Windsor credits whose silence as they scrolled over the screen lasted just long enough for me to sigh a few times and pull the blanket up to my chin.

I bought Annie Hall on DVD, spent the days reading the last of Salinger and crying into my journal and the nights memorizing this movie, skipping to my favorite scenes before I went to bed. When my dog chewed it up a few weeks later, when I was growing more accustomed to loss but still very young, my first thought was, “Oh well, my husband will own it anyway.”

Still, though, when I think of Annie Hall, I don’t think too much. I clutch my heart and remember what it was like to get out of the car in downtown South Bend, after one of my particularly carefree parking jobs, and hear the boy who had taught me about this movie at just the right time mutter, “It’s okay, I can walk to the curb from here.” It was our style guide to life and love, our Strunk & White of sentimentalism before we knew enough about it ourselves to draw any real conclusions. He was no Woody Allen circa 1978 but I didn’t know that; I hadn’t made it out to the other side of that kind of believing in people yet.

(I’ll let you know when I do.)

Meaghan O’Connell is a writer living in Brooklyn. She will be hosting Tumblr Reads this Friday in NYC at Housing Works Bookstore and is the co-editor of the Kickstarter-powered book project, Coming and Crying.