Thinking about Christopher Walken as Annie Hall’s brother and the nuanced mental health take that sure, Jews were neurotic, but WASPs were crazy
Whereas from a modern standpoint it was really that he had depression while Alvy had anxiety
Thinking about Christopher Walken as Annie Hall’s brother and the nuanced mental health take that sure, Jews were neurotic, but WASPs were crazy
So everyone’s connecting real-life incestuous abuse accusations against Woody Allen with Manhattan, substantially about dating a 17yo Mariel Hemingway
But uh, ever thought about how parental the relationship in Annie Hall was? Like there’s this older man – already someone in political and media life – who cultivates her life as a guide. Improves her real estate situation, gets her back to singing, into therapy. Inducts her into the right way to be – how to inhabit the city, to see The Sorrow and the Pity, what to think of Marshall McLuhan.
And in the end her leaving is kind of understood as the sorrow of a dad seeing his little girl leave the nest, leavened with the pride that it was how he raised her that enabled that independence, no?
Also, even the idea of streamers as findommes or courtesans isn’t honestly all that novel in American culture
If you go back to the original noir period, you know how you have this figure of the nightclub torch singer, who cultivates a sultry look and demeanor, who put on performances of seductive singing and dancing with a stage patter to cultivate a sense of intimacy, for an audience of lonely men who might try to capture her attentions off the stage by doing things for her or buying her expensive gifts?
…well?
Then again, the fact that she was falling into this role naive while he had enough sense of American cultural history to know what this meant was already a plot point in MPDG ur-text Annie Hall in 1970-fucking-7