I have never understood why Woody Allen has never been hugely successful in the States. He does it for Europe, but that just disappoints me in its confirmation of stereotype.
The stories are universal and the humour always fly underneath the radar, escaping the nets that trap the quick and the clichéd. They always give you the real in the syntax of the fantastic, truth and laughter found in exaggeration and the intermingling of the factual and the psychic.
I just finished re-watching Annie Hall. This viewing, as always, erased all my other viewings, leaving a fresh impression, a new track in the soil.
Memory also has this ability. When you remember something it re-establishes the imprints it originally marked out or creates a new one with different associations, new neighbours. It happens especially when you break up with a partner.
The human brain disallows stability when it comes to love and its demise. It obliterates the footprints and starts anew, looking for a new culprit, a more novel cause of death. After break ups we all become coroners, seeking out the time and place of a persons leaving this realm and becoming a series of clues and faint traces, fragments of names and dates.
For people have not watched Annie Hall, the main character is Alvy Singer, a comedian living in New York on his wit and self-deprecatory affectations. He is a serial monogamist and a serial marrier. He always sabotages his own relationships because he would “never want to become a member of a club that would have him as a member”. He is anxious, self-involved, death obsessed and looking for love even though he is pathologically incapable of it.
He finds Annie Hall, or more accurately she finds him, and they start a brief but intense affair. We can never be sure that it is brief and intense because the whole film is retrospective, with Alvy dissecting the relationship to determine what went so horribly wrong. It becomes clear that all relationships in memory and hindsight appear to be short and intense, no matter how long they actually last.
Along with its study of the trajectory of a relationship it tries to comprehend the act of remembering a relationship after the fact so as to get to the root of its falling apart.
The whole thing presents itself as a series of sketches that encompass all the major milestones of any relationship. The giddy first days, when our thoughts are coherent but our mouths are not. The slow entry into each other, the breaking through the skin, the learning of histories and the construction of a new and shared history. Like a film a relationship takes these small parcels and turns them into a story, into something that can be told and judged. We come to the inevitable downward tail of the arch and the final disillusionment.
Alvy has spent the whole film following this trajectory, this story and trying to finger the villain. It could have been his personality or his upbringing that would ultimately force him to endure self-recrimination. For the anxious/insecure type, for the paranoid type (there is a dialogue in the beginning of the film where Alvy is convinced that an unseen character has asked him if “would jew like some food?” instead of “would you like some food?”) love does not exist without jealousy, love does not exist without the wanting to dominate the person you love, wanting to make yourself proportionately larger.
The episodic remembrance of a relationship allows you to diminish the time that elapses between relevant events or episodes. You can look back on all the little arguments as one big argument. You can see the same themes stringing through all the lines you used to see as distinct and unique. A fear you find justified because you find it specific become persistent and all pervading when you look back and realise the event had very little to do with the fear. Joy begins to look like the euphoria of a little boy who has found a treasure he is more than willing to discard in a few minutes time.
Annie Hall allowed me to see that when you enter a new relationship and when you leave an old one it is memory that defines each transition. Memories of old relationships and other life experiences force the new relationship’s hand, and memories of a recently deserted relationship reaffirms old, stale mistakes and self-perceptions.
It is a joy to witness Woody Allen finding joy in the midst of this trial of love. It’s an ability he possesses largely thanks to his capacity to see any relationship as a nexus of life, as a condensing of all life. Art, politics, humour and philosophy can all find expression with the confines of a house built by, and for, two. In Annie Hall the two characters give each other unreservedly to the other at the beginning, but they never lose themselves in the process. This is what causes the irreparable fracture at the end but it is also what makes this film an antipode to the fairytale and a place to find hope rather than despair – the individual is never broken by the break-up. They either learn or remain intact and live to fight another love.
