Through intense visuality and the complex connections between various characters, Woody Allen in Annie Hall suggests an inextricable connection between geographic location and identity in terms of class, religion, politics and identity interpersonal relationships. Within the film, key characters are introduced, defined, and developed for the audience both through where they exist geographically in 1970s America and how they perceive other places culturally. By describing this intersection of position and identity in society, Allen offers a personal insight into regional differences during this time. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Allen's character of Alvy Singer is largely defined by both his Brooklyn upbringing and his proud self-identification as a Manhattanite. Young Alvy's initial anxiety is shown in a scene with his mother in a doctor's office, where he explains his fear that the entire universe is inexorably expanding towards dissolution. This is the first example of Alvy's cosmopolitan attitude: even as a child he contemplates the entire universe and reaches conclusions about life based on distant cosmic events. Furthermore, a contrast is established between Alvy's broad, abstract thinking and the relatively concrete parochialism of his mother, who insists very matter-of-factly, "What does the Universe have to do with this? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!" In his adult life, Alvy - as well as in the film - displays an ambivalent attitude towards New York, making fun of it but ultimately loving the city. In the first scene with adult Alvy, we see him complaining to his best friend Rob about anti-Semitism. Rob shifts the conversation to California, suggesting that his friend move to Los Angeles, an idea that Alvy dismisses, saying, "I don't want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can turn right on the red road." light." Yet, in the next scene, Alvy's irritation with New York becomes apparent. Waiting for Annie outside a theater, he is hassled by two rude men in leather jackets who, despite not quite recognizing Alvy, demand the his autograph and loudly exclaim, "Alvy Singer here!" Alvy insults them as urban bumpkins, saying, "What is this, a Teamsters meeting?" and, to Annie once she arrives:Alvy: I'm with the cast of The Godfather.Annie: You'll have to learn to deal with it.Alvy: Deal! I'm dealing with two guys called "Cheech!" Later, while the two wait in line for tickets, Alvy is annoyed by a loud intellectual who speaks with his girlfriend. Regarding them, Alvy notes: "We probably met them while answering an ad in the New York Review of Books. 'A thirty-year-old academic wishes to meet a woman interested in Mozart, James Joyce and sodomy.'" Alvy's irritation with the elements of New York is in stark contrast to the spirited love for 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 countless possibilities for interpersonal contact, which the film eagerly explores to make a point in the ticket line scene, Alvy pulls out of the ether Marshall McLuhan. Truman Capote walks through the famous people in Central Park watching the scene while Alvy observes: "Here is the winner of the Truman Capote lookalike contest." surreally advice and personal information from complete strangers whothey walk down the street. An old woman explains to him, "love fades away", to which Alvy reflects, "love fades away? God, that's a depressing thought." Much like Coney Island for young Alvy, Manhattan for adult Alvy seems like a playground, as he plays strangers as mental soundboards to resolve his romantic anxieties. Underlining 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 casually pet his horse. While Brooklyn is not expanding, Manhattan certainly is – inward, through these fantastic and seemingly endless possibilities suggested here. Even more striking is the intense visual focus the city itself receives in the film. Allen's penchant for long shots and creative compositions often provide sweeping, beautiful views of Manhattan that put the city in the foreground. In the opening scene where Alvy and Rob are walking, the two appear within the frame far apart in the background, constantly moving towards the camera while the viewer is given 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 in the left side of the frame as the camera pans to follow them. The lighting of the shop windows completes the action. As the shot begins, Annie anguishes over her performance as they walk past shops lit in bright reddish hues; Alvy improves her then stops to kiss her in front of a shop illuminated by a cold, blue light. Indeed, their relationship is often characterized emotionally by this New York setting. Alvy tells Annie, "I adore you," as the two cuddle on a pier in the evening with the Brooklyn Bridge illuminated by a festive string of green lights prominently featured in the background. They share the frame with the unmistakable feature 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 stacked beige and brown apartment buildings separated by the two futures lovers from a row of bright red and pink flowers. In his cinema, Allen almost fetishizes 1970s Manhattan by giving it such great prominence, and this aura is transmitted to the actors in the film. The troubling identity crisis that Alvy experiences in the film is perfectly complemented by this broad duality. Alvy's observation in the opening monologue, "I would never want to belong to any club that wanted me as a member," reflects this love/hate relationship with Manhattan. Alvy considers himself a member of New York's cognoscenti, yet at a cocktail party with his ex-wife Robin, he mocks his fellow urban intellectuals: "You know, one thing about intellectuals, they show 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 in contrast to the open-mindedness Annie maintains when the two meet in the third act of the film. At his party in Los Angeles, Tony Lacey tells the two "you're still New Yorkers," to which Alvy replies, "Yeah, I like it there." He is, for all intents and purposes, a "real" New Yorker, one who is both a product and an embodiment of the city and its culture. Alvy's attitudes and speech help reinforce this relationship between place and identity in the film. When he first meets his future first wife at an Adlai Stevenson rally, 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, right, and that kind of red diaper really, you know, strike oriented, stop me before I become a complete imbecile. The syntax of this line is significant. Alvy calls Allison “New York” and “Central Park West,” as if these same place names could function as descriptive adjectives that lend a certain quality to what is being changed. Likewise, Alvy often metonymically characterizes others in relation to their individual locations. Teasing passersby in Central Park, he calls a man, "Mr. Miami Beach" and says of a pair of odd-looking men, "They're back from Fire Island." In fact, Alvy's attraction to Annie is largely influenced by her unique charm, which Alvy consistently attributes to the fact that she grew up in a small Midwestern town. Annie, an aspiring singer who moved to New York as an adult, peppers her speech with cutesy expressions unfamiliar to Alvy. A famous example is this dialogue that appears at the beginning of 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 anyone ever told me that I would date a girl who used phrases like "la-de-da"... Annie: Oh, that's right. That you really like those New York girls. When Annie mentions "Grammy Hall," Alvy, exasperated, remarks, "What did you do, grow up in a regular Rockwell painting?" Alvy eventually derisively calls these phrases "tidy" and "passionate" his "Chippewa Falls expressions," in reference to the rural Wisconsin town where Annie grew up. Despite having no particular knowledge of this place, Alvy doesn't shy away from stereotyping Annie's childhood experiences there:Annie: [talking about her ex-boyfriends] There was Dennis from Chippewa Falls High School.Alvy: Dennis-right, uh, uh ... a local guy would probably meet in front of the cinema on Saturday night. Yet Alvy enjoys a certain admiration for this life, despite its frequent condescension. When he finally visits Annie's house, he delivers this soliloquy to the audience: I can't believe this family. Annie's mother, she's really beautiful. And they talk about swap meets and boat docks, and the old lady at the end of the table is a classic Jew hater. And they look really American, you know, very healthy and… like they never get sick or anything like that. Nothing to do with my family. Interestingly, Alvy thinks that Annie's family in Wisconsin represents America and that, in contrast, her family in New York does not, as if one part of the country could even encapsulate the culture of the entire country. Speaking of how America perceives New York, Alvy says to Rob in a separate sequence: Can't you see? The rest of the country looks down on New York as if we were left-wing communists, Jews, and homosexual pornographers. I think of us this 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 tell you this because, as an artist, I think you'll understand." This line establishes a comparison between Duane and Alvy. Duane's halting speech brings to mind Alvy's anxious stammer, and Duane, who appears to be a bit of a dimwit, suggests that he too has artistic attitudes at a level where he can only relate to a fellow "artist" like Alvy. Perhaps, then, Alvy and Duane are simply the product of their locations: where Duane sees swap meets, Alvy sees Bergman films; while Duane taps iholes, Alvy visits his analyst. A similar parallel exists between Annie and Alvy's grandmothers. Grammy Hall appears cold, austere and very offended by Alvy. There are various clues in the script that help explain Annie's grandmother's point of view. When Annie and Alvy first meet, Annie exclaims with some surprise, "You're what the Grammy Hall would call a 'real Jew!'" as if Alvy were some exotic creature from the East Coast. Furthermore, 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 elderly anti-Semite growing up in the Midwest, is not very familiar with Jews and sees them as dangerous outsiders. Similarly, Alvy tells Annie in another scene that his grandmother never gave him gifts, as she was "too busy getting raped by Cossacks". She too, then, was largely a product of her circumstances geographically different from those of Annie's grandmother. In the film's third act, Rob has moved to Los Angeles, where he appears to have been transformed by his new position. When the film revisits him as the plot follows Alvy and Annie's trip to the West Coast for an award presentation, Rob has become very sexually active and invigorated by the atmosphere of Los Angeles. When Alvy and Rob spy on a girl at a party, Alvy remarks, "She's a ten, Max, and that's great for you because you're used to twos, right?" After picking Alvy up from prison, Rob puts on a ridiculous helmet and Alvy remarks, "Max, are we driving through plutonium?" Rob, in his final lines of the film, responds, "Keeps the alpha rays away, Max. You don't get old." Meanwhile, at the end of the film, Alvy elicits a strong and bitter dislike towards Los Angeles that harks back to his conversation with Rob at the beginning, where he first disparaged the idea of ​​moving to the West Coast. He criticizes Los Angeles as a wasteland and without culture. Visually, Beverly Hills presents a great contrast to Manhattan. We see wide streets lined with tall palm trees on broad grassy lawns instead of small, sparse trees along gray sidewalks. In this warm and snowless climate, Christmas decorations are set up in front of the houses. The eclectic architecture contrasts with the regularity of Manhattan's brownstones; on this, Alvy sarcastically remarks: "Yes, 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 bar in an attempt to get her back. Annie says she won't marry him, and Alvy can only think of attracting her purely in terms of position: Alvy: Why? Do you want to live here all year round? It's like living in Munchkin land. [...]Alvy: You won't go back to New York? Annie: What's so great about New York? I mean, it's a dying city. Finally, Annie pointedly compares Alvy to New York itself: Annie: Alvy, you're incapable of enjoying life, you know that? I mean, you're like New York City. You are just this person. You are like this island all to yourself. With this knowledge finally made clear, Annie and Alvy are finally over. It is interesting to note, however, that the character of 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 between two worlds, neither of which is truly home. Perhaps, then, she is an example of someone who, unlike Alvy, is capable of enjoying all that life has to offer, someone who breaks this bond between herself and her geographic identity and takes advantage of it. However, in the final part of the film, where it is revealed that Annie is.