Annie Hall Is An Okay Movie
My parents are average parents, by which I mean my parents are obsessed with cable TV. Crime docudramas, mostly. The soundtrack to their lives is the soundtrack to Forensic Files: loud piano segues, knife-sharpening sounds, and middle-aged baritone narrators. When they die, years of reenacted felonies will flash before their eyes. They sleep to it, too, nodding off at the moment when the suspect’s semen is matched with the sample from the first-degree murder victim’s sheets. When I was growing up, we ate dinner in front of The Top Five Most Violent Serial Killers of the 1970s. Premeditated murder, hair analysis, fruit salad.
I’d just come home from my first year in New York — moving platforms and sweat-rain and dropping little pieces of my essence on the stairs of my sixth-floor walk-up — and my parents were finishing dinner. Instead of unwinding to the sounds of someone being knifed outside a 7-Eleven, they were staring at Diane Keaton and Woody Allen. Diane was trying to be polite and honest at the same time.
The lighting was beige, like you could make a late fall jacket out of every scene.
Annie Hall is a famous American movie in which Diane Keaton and Woody Allen play two heavyweight competitors in the Olympics of Extreme Self-Awareness. The competition includes activities like Marathon Monologuing, Rhythmic Repartee, Neurosis Cycling, and The Complaint Toss. The best part is, unlike the actual Olympic Games, it really does feel like a game. You can have severe anxiety and a wrecked relationship with your body and/or father, but if you talk about it while wearing tortoiseshell glasses and standing in line for a picture in 1977, it’s fun.
“How often do you take cabs?” my mom asked as Diane Keaton got into a cab, sobbing.
Like every Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall belongs to the genre of films in which two people live in a big city and build conversational sandcastles that eventually crumble, provoking tantrums. The characters only seem good at going out to dinner.
Woody Allen threw a paperback book across a $700/month Greenwich Village apartment. My dad went, “ha.”
I’ve known seven Annie Halls. One of them invited me to see King Lear at BAM a few years ago. He wore an over-the-shoulder sweater with the sleeves wrapped around his neck. Another walked through a construction site on Houston Street whilst eating California rolls out of a plastic supermarket tray. A third Annie Hall came to a party at my apartment wearing a black Marimekko dress with large orange petri-dish-size dots all over it. Her thing was telling people to imagine their blood cells are cars. “Now pretend there’s a traffic jam. Your arm is bumper to bumper.”
I’ve known four Woody Allens. One lived in the penthouse of a building a few blocks west of Union Square and could summarize almost every book he’s never read. We had dinner once, at the Cowgirl in West Village, and during a lull in the conversation he looked straight at me and started laughing at a tweet he was visualizing in his head.
“I love this movie,” I thought to myself.
If Annie Hall were made today, the entire movie would be spent on Woody Allen’s sweaty couch. Diane Keaton would have a rose gold MacBook (a gift from her parents) and Woody Allen would have a Dell. They’d sit on Woody’s bed for the entire 93 minutes, CTRL+T’ing through motion picture after motion picture after article after article after thing after thing after didyouseethis after Ialreadyreadthat.
Right now, I have a total of 777 tabs open across four browser windows. (Educated guess.) I don’t even remember how they got there. I blacked out, installed Chrome, scanned the timeline, right-clicked, and built my own two-dimensional Library of Alexandria/My Apartment. The tabs will end when I die. On my hospital bed, as my organs shut down one by one, I’ll close the last tab and drift into a very relevant sleep.
Diane and Woody were breaking up. Diane was packing her books: “All the books on death and dying are yours, and all the poetry books are mine.”
You can’t make a movie about going to the movies anymore. You can’t make a movie about giving back your copy of Denial of Death anymore. Or maybe you can, but it doesn’t register the same. I wonder if they’ll make “READ” posters for kids growing up today, but instead of holding a book Michael Jordan will be hunched over his Chrome tabs. That would make me happy.
At the end of the movie, Diane and Woody go out for dinner. It only lasts a second or two in movie time. Diane is visiting from Los Angeles, where she’s moved, and Woody is in New York. But wait. Actually, the whole thing happens inside one of Woody’s voice-overs. One long monologue, one long thought, one long hope.
My parents flipped the channel to a reenactment of a brutal homicide. I said “I love you” and went to bed.
