Annie, Alvy & Danny

Annie Hall becomes a tool in a teenager's struggle to understand

I had seen it three times already, at least three. No wonder my mother couldn't believe that this was how I wanted to spend my birthday.

"What's it called again, son?" "Annie Hall." "Alright, It's your birthday, Danny. Go."

And so I did, by myself - something else she could not comprehend, that I did not want the company of relatives, friends, or anybody else.

At a time when life is just beginning - high school parties, girlfriends, alliances forged by booze, dope and disdain for authority - I was already sick of people. I had already seen at that tender age, I was convinced, the entire depth of their characters: the suburban housewives with their alcoholism and affairs, which lurked just beneath the surface of their sunny, placid existences; the husbands, chummy authoritarians whose devotion to anonymous jobs and children that they didn't particularly want explained the gruffness that would occasionally puncture their affability; fellow teenagers, each one determined to break free from this unhappy destiny, each one so transparently doomed to failure.

The movies, that was my cocoon from all of it, a dark, larval state I was free to enter any time I had five dollars. Just me - just me from now on - and the genuinely interesting, those on screen.

They had their problems, definitely, their neuroses, their battles, their failures, but something else too, the thing that everybody that I knew in the real world lacked:aspirations that were attainable. They could get the girl, they could win the contest, they could triumph over evil.

The smaller dreams, the ones those who made up the audience contained, were the tough ones, the ones prone to compromise, the ones that could be so easily and frustratingly tainted by materialism, family, and the burden of respectability.

After my birthday screening, I decided to walk home. It would be a long one, affording me plenty of time to reflect.

As the uninteresting skyscape of suburbia came into view, I began to understand what it was about this film that kept drawing me back to it; after all, in Annie Hall, boy definitely doesn't get girl. It was the realization that their break-up was exotic to me; Alvy and Annie had become the only adult couple I knew who didn't do it, who didn't stay together, have children, and assure themselves the struggles of the people in the garden homes spread out before me.

So that, thought I, is what my misery, my loneliness is about, as is Alvy's and Annie's. Such is the make up of transcendence.