Yesterday, I argued that Woody Allen was being nihilistic when he said:
As you can see, the quoted line is not the joke but Woody's explanation of it. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is Alvy Singer's explanation for Allen is in character here.
Or is he in character? He talks like he isn't in character. He just appears with no set up, no context, so we naturally assume that this is Woody himself taking a few minutes to set the thing up for us. Even when he says, "Annie and I broke up," it could be real.
And the movie ends with Alvy directing a play which he clearly set up so he can have in "fiction" what he couldn't have in "real" life. Or is it the other way around? We're deliberately being teased with the notion that this could be real.
At the same time, we're deliberately being set up not to take it seriously. For example, after setting up this bleak nihilistic worldview, Allen then puts it into the mouth of a child so we can all laugh at it and we don't have to think, "Does he really means this?"
Imagine this, Phillip and Theresa are married. They lived together before the wedding but Theresa insisted that they live apart for the last week, "So it really will be different when we get married." And she goes up to her family cottage to increase the separation.
Years later, Phillip is at the lake himself and talking with Theresa's lifelong friend and ex-boyfriend Patrick and Patrick inadvertently reveals that he was also up at the lake that week. Phillip, trying to hide his nervousness, asks him if he saw Theresa that week. Patrick looks him right in the face and says, "Yeah, we had a wild, farewell fling that week." He then waits a moment for effect, and bursts out laughing as if it were all a joke.
Think of Baudelaire's quip that the devil's greatest trick was to convince us that he didn't exist.
We can take the joke about the two ladies in the Catskills any number of ways. Me, I would be inclined to take it the way Billy Carmichael does. But I don't think Woody does. When he says, "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it's all over much too soon," he damn well means it. That's the way he understood it. As Mia Farrow learned the hard way, you should worry a whole lot if Woody ever spent a week alone at the lake with a young and beautiful woman who means a lot to you.
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it's all over much too soon.In the comments, Billy Carmichael contested this:
The joke says, 'Life really isn't all that bad, so lighten up a bit. You really love it and you know you do, you silly Malvolio, you.' I don't know where she gets being thankful for the bad from, but the joke certainly turns one away from the absurd obsession of bad and reminds one that we all love life and hope it never ends. This is not nihilism.In a sense I agree. I think Billy is quite right to insist that is the morally healthy reaction to the joke. But ... well, first, let's go back to the source. There are probably a whole lot of people who have never seen Annie Hall, which is where it comes from. Here is the opening scene where it appears;
As you can see, the quoted line is not the joke but Woody's explanation of it. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is Alvy Singer's explanation for Allen is in character here.
Or is he in character? He talks like he isn't in character. He just appears with no set up, no context, so we naturally assume that this is Woody himself taking a few minutes to set the thing up for us. Even when he says, "Annie and I broke up," it could be real.
And the movie ends with Alvy directing a play which he clearly set up so he can have in "fiction" what he couldn't have in "real" life. Or is it the other way around? We're deliberately being teased with the notion that this could be real.
At the same time, we're deliberately being set up not to take it seriously. For example, after setting up this bleak nihilistic worldview, Allen then puts it into the mouth of a child so we can all laugh at it and we don't have to think, "Does he really means this?"
Imagine this, Phillip and Theresa are married. They lived together before the wedding but Theresa insisted that they live apart for the last week, "So it really will be different when we get married." And she goes up to her family cottage to increase the separation.
Years later, Phillip is at the lake himself and talking with Theresa's lifelong friend and ex-boyfriend Patrick and Patrick inadvertently reveals that he was also up at the lake that week. Phillip, trying to hide his nervousness, asks him if he saw Theresa that week. Patrick looks him right in the face and says, "Yeah, we had a wild, farewell fling that week." He then waits a moment for effect, and bursts out laughing as if it were all a joke.
Think of Baudelaire's quip that the devil's greatest trick was to convince us that he didn't exist.
We can take the joke about the two ladies in the Catskills any number of ways. Me, I would be inclined to take it the way Billy Carmichael does. But I don't think Woody does. When he says, "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it's all over much too soon," he damn well means it. That's the way he understood it. As Mia Farrow learned the hard way, you should worry a whole lot if Woody ever spent a week alone at the lake with a young and beautiful woman who means a lot to you.
Thanks for this addition. I'm one of the few people who haven't seen 'Annie Hall', and I see the devil is in the delivery. (Yikes: he doesn't get the joke he's telling--shouldn't he be smarter than that?)
ReplyDeleteI've seen a few Allen movies, but not many. Mrs. Carmichael and I enjoyed 'A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy', but wish we hadn't seen 'Match Point' at all. And to answer my own question, no he isn't smarter than that, but he should be. And that's a real problem--for both him and his audience.
Thanks for the post!