Through intense visualization and the complex connections between various characters, Woody Allen in Annie Hall suggests an inextricable link between location and identity in terms class, religion, politics and interpersonal relationships. In the film, key characters are introduced, defined, and developed for the audience both based on their geographic location in 1970s America and how they perceive other locations culturally. In describing this intersection between location and identity in society, Allen provides personal insight into regional differences during this period. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"? Get the original essay Allen's character, Alvy Singer, is largely defined by both his upbringing in Brooklyn and his proud identification as a than Manhattanite. Young Alvy's early anxiety is illustrated in a scene with his mother in a doctor's office, where he explains his fear that the entire universe is expanding inexorably toward dissolution. This is the first example of Alvy's cosmopolitan attitude: even as a child, he contemplates the entire universe and reaches a conclusion about life based on distant cosmic events. Furthermore, a contrast is established between Alvy's broad, abstract thinking and the relatively down-to-earth parochialism of his mother, who insists in a very matter-of-fact tone: "What is 'Universe has to do with it? Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not growing! » In his adult life, Alvy – much like in the film – displays an ambivalent attitude towards New York, mocking it but ultimately cherishing the city. In the first scene with adult Alvy, we see him talking to his best friend Rob about anti-Semitism. Rob turns the conversation to California, suggesting that his friend move to Los Angeles, an idea that Alvy rejects, saying, "I don't want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to turn right on a red road." . light." Yet in the next scene, Alvy's irritation with New York becomes evident. While waiting for Annie outside a theater, he is harassed by two rude men in leather jackets who, although they don't fully recognize Alvy, ask for his autograph and loudly exclaim: "Alvy Singer over here Alvy insults them by calling them urban thugs, saying: "What is this, a reunion of the! Teamsters? and, to Annie once she arrives: Alvy: I'm with the cast of The Godfather. Annie: You're going to have to learn how to deal with them. Alvy: I'm dealing with two guys named "Cheech!" while the two wait in line for tickets, Alvy is irritated by a loud intellectual talking to his date. About them, Alvy remarks, "Probably met while answering an ad in the New York Review of Books." Around thirty academics want to meet a woman who is interested in Mozart, James Joyce and sodomy. » “Alvy's irritation with elements of New York is sharply contrasted. by the fiery love of the city that appears through various stylistic elements of the film. Despite these irritating background characters, Annie Hall's Manhattan is full of interesting people and endless opportunities for interpersonal contact, which the film avidly explores. To prove his point about the queue scene, Alvy pulls Marshall McLuhan from the ether. Truman Capote strolls through the famous Central Park scene as Alvy remarks, "There's the winner of the Truman Capote lookalike contest." At one point in the film, Alvy, troubled by his breakup with Annie, surreally collects advice and personal information from perfectstrangers walking in the street. An old woman explains to him: “love fades”, to which Alvy reflects: “love fades? God, that’s a depressing thought. » Much like Coney Island for the young Alvy, Manhattan for the adult Alvy seems to be a playground, as he plays the strangers as mental sounding boards to resolve his romantic anxieties. Underscoring this point of view: At the end of the scene, Alvy even stops a mounted policeman, a small ornament of the city, in the middle of the street to nonchalantly pet his horse. Although Brooklyn is not expanding, Manhattan certainly is - inward, through these fantastic and seemingly endless possibilities suggested here. Even more striking is the intense visual attention that the city itself receives in the film. Allen's propensity for long shots and creative compositions often delivers wide, beautiful views of Manhattan that put the city front and center. In the first scene where Alvy and Rob are walking, the two appear in the frame far in the background, moving steadily toward the camera while the viewer is treated to a stationary view of a tree-lined sidewalk. After Annie and Alvy leave the club on their first date together, they stroll down a dimly lit sidewalk remaining on the left side of the frame as the camera pans to follow them. The lighting of the storefronts completes the action. Early in the shot, Annie is overwhelmed by his performance as they walk past stores lit in bright, reddish hues; Alvy makes her better then stops to kiss her in front of a store lit by cool blue light. Indeed, their relationship is often emotionally characterized by this New York setting. Alvy tells Annie, "I love you," as the two cuddle on a pier in the evening with the Brooklyn Bridge lit by a festive row of green lights prominently in the background. They share the framework with the characteristic element of one of the stone towers of the bridge. In an iconic shot that appears on the film's release poster, Annie and Alvy, dressed in white, share a drink on a terrace behind Annie's apartment, flanked by a seemingly endless series of beige and brown buildings superimposed, separated from the two future lovers by a row of bright red and pink flowers. In his cinema, Allen almost fetishizes Manhattan of the 1970s by giving it such importance, and this aura rubs off on the actors in the film. The troubling identity crisis experienced by Alvy in the film is perfectly complemented by this broad duality. Alvy's remark in the opening monologue, "I would never want to belong to a club that had me as a member," reflects this love/hate relationship with Manhattan. Alvy considers himself a member of New York's cognoscenti, but at a cocktail party with his ex-wife Robin, he mocks his fellow urban intellectuals: "You know, that's one thing with intellectuals, they prove that "You can be absolutely brilliant and I have no idea what's going on." Alvy seems extremely comfortable in New York and refuses to even consider moving to a place like Los Angeles, criticizing it mercilessly unlike to the open-minded Annie keeps during their visit in the film's third act. At his party in Los Angeles, Tony Lacey tells the two, "You're still New Yorkers", to which Alvy responds: “Yeah, I love it there.” He is, for all intents and purposes, a “real” New Yorker, both a product and an embodiment of the city and its culture. 'Alvy helps reinforce this relationship between place and identity in the film When he first meets his future first wife at an Adlai Stevenson gathering, he characterizes her thus: You,you, you're like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, that's right, and the kind of red diaper really, you know, geared towards the strike, stop me before I become a complete fool. The syntax of this line is significant. Alvy calls Allison “New York” and “Central Park West,” as if these place names alone could function as descriptive adjectives lending a certain quality to what is being edited. Likewise, Alvy often characterizes others metonymically in relation to their individual locations. Mocking people in Central Park, he calls a man "Mr. Miami Beach" and says of a couple of flamboyant-looking men: "They're coming back from Fire Island." » In fact, Alvy's attraction to Annie is largely colored by her unique charm, which Alvy consistently attributes to growing up in a small Midwestern town. Annie, an aspiring singer who moved to New York as an adult, peppers her speech with cute expressions unfamiliar to Alvy. A famous example is this piece of dialogue that appears early in the film as the two are walking on a beach in the Hamptons: Annie: Well, la-de-da! Alvy: La-de-da. If I... if someone had told me that I would eliminate a girl who uses expressions like "la-de-da"... Annie: Oh, that's true. That you really like these New York girls. When Annie mentions "Grammy Hall," an exasperated Alvy remarks, "What did you do, grow up in a normal Rockwell painting?" Alvy ends up derisively calling these expressions like "neat" and "passionate" his "Chippewa Falls expressions", in reference to the rural Wisconsin town where Annie grew up. Although he has no particular knowledge of this place, Alvy is quick to stereotype Annie's childhood experiences there: Annie: [talking about her ex-boyfriends] There was Dennis from high school of Chippewa Falls. Alvy: Dennis, that's right, uh, uh...a local kid would probably end up outside the movie theater on Saturday night. Yet Alvy enjoys a certain admiration for this life, despite its frequent condescension. When he finally goes to Annie's house, he delivers this monologue addressed to the audience: I can't believe this family. Annie's mother, she's really beautiful. And they talk about swap meets and boat basins, and the old lady at the end of the table is a classic Jew hater. And, uh, they really look American, you know, very healthy and... like they never get sick or anything. Nothing to do with my family. Interestingly, Alvy thinks Annie's family in Wisconsin is typical of America, and his own family in New York doesn't, as if any part of the country could even summarize the culture of the whole. Regarding how America views New York, Alvy says this to Rob in a separate clip: Don't you see? The rest of the country looks down on New York like we're left-wing communist, Jewish, gay pornographers. I think of us that way sometimes, and I live here. The idea of ​​a place producing identity is reinforced by similar parallels. In Chippewa, Alvy is shaken by a conversation he has with Duane, Annie's flannel-shirted brother, who delivers a dark monologue about contemplating suicide, which begins: "I'm telling you this because as an artist, I think you will understand.” This line draws a comparison between Duane and Alvy. Duane's hesitant manner of speaking is reminiscent of Alvy's own anxious stutter, and Duane, who appears to be a bit of an idiot, suggests that he, too, has artistic attitudes on a level in which he can only relate to a colleague “artist” asAlvy. Perhaps, then, Alvy and Duane are simply products of their filming locations: where Duane sees swap meets, Alvy sees Bergman films; while Duane plugs the holes, Alvy visits his analyst. A similar parallel exists between Annie and Alvy's grandmothers. Grammy Hall appears cold, dour and very offended by Alvy. The storyline contains various allusions that help explain Annie's grandmother's point of view. When Annie and Alvy first meet, Annie exclaims in surprise, "You are what Grammy Hall would call a 'real Jew!' » » as if Alvy were some exotic creature from the East Coast. Additionally, when Annie's grandmother observes Alvy at the dinner table, she imagines him as an Orthodox Jew. The implication is that Grammy Hall, as an old anti-Semite raised in the Midwest, knows very little about Jews and views them as dangerous outsiders. Similarly, Alvy tells Annie in another scene that his own grandmother never gave him gifts because she was "too busy getting raped by the Cossacks." She too was therefore a product of her circumstances, largely geographically different from those of Annie's grandmother. By the film's third act, Rob has moved to Los Angeles, where he has seemingly been transformed by his new location. When the film revisits it as the plot follows Alvy and Annie's trip to the West Coast for an awards show, Rob has become very sexually active and invigorated by the atmosphere of Los Angeles. When Alvy and Rob see a girl at a party, Alvy remarks, "She's a ten, Max, and that's great for you because you're, you're used to a two, right? After having retrieved Alvy from prison, Rob dons a ridiculous helmet and Alvy remarks, "Max, are we going through plutonium? Rob, in the last lines of the film, responds, "Keep the alpha rays away, Max? . You're not getting old." Meanwhile, at the end of the film, Alvy elicits a strong and bitter antipathy toward Los Angeles that harkens back to his conversation with Rob at the beginning, where he first disparaged the idea. moving to the West Coast. He criticizes Los Angeles as a barren, cultureless wasteland. Visually, Beverly Hills presents a great contrast to Manhattan. We see wide roads lined with tall palm trees on wide grassy lawns instead of small, sparsely built trees. in gray sidewalks In this warm, snow-free climate, Christmas decorations are installed in front of the houses. The eclectic architecture contrasts with the regularity of Manhattan's brownstones; regarding this, Alvy sarcastically remarks: "Yeah, the architecture is really consistent, isn't it? French next to Spanish, next to Tudor, next to Japanese." After Alvy and Annie break up for the last time and Annie moves to Los Angeles, Alvy returns and meets her at an outdoor cafe to try to get her back. Annie says she won't marry him, and Alvy can only think of her in terms of location: Alvy: Why? Do you want to live here all year round? It's like living in Munchkin country. [...]Alvy: Aren't you going back to New York?Annie: What's so great about New York? I mean, it's a dying city. Finally, Annie expressly compares Alvy to New York itself:Annie: Alvy, you are incapable of enjoying life, you know that? I mean, you're like New York. You are just that person. You are like this island in yourself. With this realization finally clear, Annie and Alvy are over for good. It is interesting to note, however, that the character Annie seems to suffer less from this concept of place as identity than the other characters. While Alvy is tied to New York and Rob is in love with Los Angeles, Annie slips through both worlds, neither of which is truly her..