Lets Discuss My Private Life:

Annie Hall and the Transposition of Narrative Structure

Michael Jones
12-16-2014

1. This is my uh, third night here

2. I havent been here in uh, about eight uh, months now,
3. was the last time I was here.
4. And um, since I was here, last, a lot of
5. significant things have occurred
6. in my private life, that
7. I thought we could go over tonight, and um
8. evaluate
The above transcription is a segment of a standup comedy performance by
Woody Allen recorded in the 1960s. Woody has just been introduced, and after a short
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round of applause, he begins his routine. The transcription is essentially the first joke
in the routine. When I decided to write a paper on the use of language in Annie Hall,
at first I struggled to find an angle from which to approach the film. I watched the
film several times, and while I knew that this film was interesting from a linguistics
standpoint, I could not seem to get at exactly how I could devise an argument that
could generalize about some aspect of the film. I couldnt see any patterns, but my gut
told me to continue my search.
With some help from literature about the film, I was able to see a linguistically
relevant pattern in Annie Hall; and I think visualizing the setting in which the above
portion of monologue originally took place is important to understanding that pattern.
Woody is onstage in a nightclub, standing before a lively audience. He addresses the
audience directly, probably directing his gaze and gesticulations toward them. This is
a straightforward speech event; easy to visualize, but important nonetheless.
Now think about the opening scene in Annie Hall. The film-viewing audience
doesnt quite know what to expect yet, but they can see that Woody is performing in a
very familiar way. He faces the camera just as he would an audience in a nightclub.
The paralinguistic gestures that accompany his monologue too, are directed at the film
viewing audience (vicariously through the camera). In this opening scene we can see
that some of the characteristics of the stage performance have been transferred to the
filmic medium. But this may not seem unusual or interesting to a viewing audience.
The image they see is one of Woody standing in front of a monochromatic backdrop.
Who else would he address but us (the camera)? they might well ask. There is
nothing in the environment for him to react to. In addition, viewers have been
conditioned to view such filmic representations in this way through the news media,
which regularly makes use of this sort of addresser-audience framework.
What is particularly interesting about Annie Hall is that in the opening scene, this
is not Woody speaking, but Alvy Singer, the protagonist of the film. Alvy narrates the
story as Alvy, and the audience realizes this fact in subsequent scenes, when Alvy is
seen to exist in a world that is distinctly separate from that of the audience. But even
when Alvys speech is visually contextualized as existing within his fictional world,
he continues to directly address the film-viewing audience. In an article entitled
Annie Hall and the Issue of Modernism, Thomas Schatz refers to this aspect of the
film as self-reflexivity. That is, in addressing the camera, Alvy draws attention to the
fact that he is being filmed. I go further to say that this practice assumes an audience,
so that it is not merely self-referential, but also acknowledges an outside audience.
So in Annie Hall, one of the most significant features of the standup comedy
speech genre is transposed onto film. But, as Schatz argues in the abovementioned
article, this transposition is not limited to paralinguistic features. Schatz writes that in
certain segments of the film:
the standup comedy format dominates the narrative construction.
That is, the events depicted follow an associative, metaphoric pattern
of construction rather than the sequential, chronological pattern of
most classical Hollywood narrative films.
My viewing of the film supports Schatzs argument. Woody Allen seems to have
transposed the entire speech genre onto the film narrative. Woody Allens standup
comedy routinesas is the case with many comediansare highly digressive in their
narrative structure. That is, the stories being told do not adhere to strict chronology,
and are often strung together tangentially, although they can be subsumed under a
common theme. The following excerpt from the same standup performance illustrates
this structural trait. This is still fairly early in the comedy routine, and Allen has
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proceeded to tell a series of stories from his personal life:

1. I formed a power bloc with my uncle,
2. we sent my grandmother to jail,
3. shes learning a trade, Im happy to say.
4. I went to NYU myself,
5. I was a uh, a philo major there too.
6. I took all the abstract philosophy courses in college
7. Like Truth and Beauty, and
8. Advanced Truth and Beauty, and
9. Intermediate Truth, and
10. Introduction to God,
11. Death 101.
12. I was thrown out of NYU my freshman year
13. I cheated on my metaphysics final, and
14. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
The beginning of this excerpt is part of a joke Woody tells about having formed a
corporation with his family members. Notice that in line 4 Allen moves on to the next
joke in this string of personal stories; one that is minimally related to the last line of
the story about forming a corporation through the concept of learning (line 3).
While the rest of the quoted material adheres to the NYU years theme, it progresses
associatively rather than sequentially.
This distinctive standup comedy narrative style is used in Annie Hall, and I will
attempt to demonstrate the manifestations of it as clearly as I can. In its filmic form,
this narrative style can appear open ended and without direction. However, two key
observations explain why viewers of the film do not leave it without a sense of
knowing what the film is about. First, as is the case in the excerpted portions of the
stage performance by Woody Allen, the various stories, or jokes, tend to be framed,
subsumed under a common theme so that listeners have the ability to follow it as they
would a narrative. Second, as one of the writers of this film (Marshall Brickman was a
co-author), Allen does not allow the standup comedy style to dominate the entire film.
That is, the narrative form is strategically restricted; it is employed to express a
specific meaning to the audience.
In Schatzs analysis of the film the standup comedy format pervades the first
movement, or the first twenty narrative sequences of the film. Schatz defines a
narrative sequence as an event which is differentiated spatiotemporally from the
events preceding and following it. Schatz has argued that there are seventy such
sequences in Annie Hall, which can be divided, on the basis of narrative style, into
three movements. According to this analysis, the first movement ends just before Alvy
accompanies his friend, Rob, to play tennis with Annie for the first time. The second
movement, according to Schatz, adheres to what he calls the classical narrative style,
which is distinguished by its relative chronological integrity. This classical narrative
style alternates with the standup comedy narrative style for the rest of the film.
Schatzs argument is that this alternation is due to fluctuations in Alvys sense of selfconsciousness as a result of changes that occur in his relationship with Annie.
Whenever the relationship seems to be working, the classical narrative style
dominates; but the film narrative becomes more digressive when relations sour.
Before I continue with this paper in examining the narrative structure of Annie
Hall, I think it is necessary to state clearly what is meant by narrative for the
purposes of my argument. In Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English
Vernacular, William Labov defines narrative as one method of recapitulating past
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experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which

(it is inferred) actually occurred. I will argue here that Labovs definition of narrative
applies most closely to the classical narrative style, in that events in the film are
depicted as events that occurred in the past and follow a sequential pattern. But, as I
have discussed, in making Annie Hall, Woody Allen very frequently flouts sequence.
For the purposes of this paper, I define a narrative broadly, and in a filmic sense, as
the visual and aural representations of events that occurred in the past. This definition
includes overt narration, such as when voice over narration is used, or when Alvy
directly addresses the camera; and the implicit narration that results from dialogue and
cutting. I will argue that just as paralinguistic cues in a speech event like a standup
comedy routine are exploited for narrative purposes, Allen has exploited the resources
afforded him by the medium of film to express narrative information.
I have also mentioned that the features of standup comedy narratives are being
transposed onto the medium film. My usage of the term transposition 1 follows that
of Robin Shoaps and other scholars. Shoaps defined transposition as a form of
entextualization in which the text is not merely replicated in a new context, but
recontextualized to match the new speech context:
Transposition, in contrast to replication, occurs when texts are
animated in order to access (and evaluate) the point of view they are
held up as representing. Transposed texts, via textual and
performance features, index ways of being, social categories, and
ideological perspectives in a way that is exploited in the signaling
event for evaluative purposes.
My main argument is that narrative structure, rather than a text, is being
recontextualized within the film through such features as dialogue and editing. There
is at least one instance of textual transposition within Annie Hall, and will return to it
later in this paper. The text I am referring to is essentially the joke that I quoted at the
beginning of this paper. Allen, in addressing an audience of perhaps one hundred or
more people, in a public speech event, states that he would like to discuss his private
life with them. This joke, as a text, is transposed onto the film, particularly poignantly
in the opening monologue. So transposition of both narrative structure and text are
relevant in Annie Hall.
Annie Hall opens with a monologue delivered by the protagonist, Alvy Singer, in
which he confesses that he is in a strange place emotionally and divulges the central
problem of the film, that is, the failure of his relationship with Annie and his
confusion over it. The following transcription is drawn from that monologue.
1. you know, lately the strangest things have been going through my
mind
2. cause, I turned forty
3. and I guess Im going through a life crisis or something,
4. I dont know, I uh
5. and Im not worried about aging
6. Im not one of those characters, you know
7. although, Im balding slightly on top
8. Thats about the worst you could say about me
9. I um, I think Im gonna get better as I get older
10. you know, I think Im gonna be the,
1 Shoaps, pp.48-49
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11. the balding, virile type

12, you know, as opposed to, say, the um,
13. distinguished gray, for instance, you know
14. unless Im neither of those two,
15. unless Im one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth,
16. who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag,
17. screaming about socialism
18. (sigh)
19. Annie and I broke up,
20. and I-I still cant get my mind around that, you know I,
21. I keep sifting the pieces of the relationship through my mind and,
22. and examining my life
23. and trying to figure out where did the screw-up come,
24. you know? and,
25. a year ago we werein love, you know? and,
26. and, and, I just
27. and its funny, Im not a, Im not a morose type
28. Im not a depressive character
29. I-I-I uh, you know
30. I was a reasonably happy kid I guess
31. I was brought up in Brooklyn during World War II
Labov developed a general theory of narrative structure in which he postulates
that the beginnings of narratives often contain orientations, the function of which
being to identify in some way the time, place, persons, and their activity or the
situation.2 This opening monologue serves a similar purpose within the films
narrative. From this monologue we learn that Annie will be a significant player in this
film due to the emotional anguish that Alvy seems to suffer from as a result of their
separation.
The delivery of this crucial part of the narrative is strongly marked for the
standup comedy narrative format, to borrow Schatzs term. I have attempted to
show the digressive nature of the monologue by breaking it into seven distinct parts
(or eight, if we include the paralinguistic sigh). Lines 1-4 pursue the main narrative
line, but Alvy then digresses tangentially in lines 5-6 seemingly to clarify what he
means (or doesnt mean) by life crisis. In lines 7-13 Alvy digresses again, and again
in lines 14-17, after which there is a complete break due a loaded sigh, which conveys
to the audience that his failed relationship with Annie is what he had been trying to
get at all along. But he quickly digresses again, this time moving on to a personal
history and discussing his childhood.
As the very first quoted text in this paper demonstrates, Allen often liked to use
the psychoanalytic speech genre as a comedic device. Here, the same therapeutic
cure-alldiscussing ones childhood memoriesis used within the film narrative.
Importantly, the opening monologue establishes in fairly explicit terms the narrative
genre. When Allen cuts from the monologue to the montage depicting his childhood,
voiceover narration is utilized to create this continuity in form.
2 Goffman, p. 364
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As the film progresses further, voiceover narration gives way to dialogue and
cutting as the primary means for conveying the narrative. But the format remains
highly associative and non-chronological in the way it proceeds. For example, after
the preliminary personal history viewers are transported via a comment by Alvys
mother that he distrusted the world to a scene set on a sidewalk in which Alvy
complains to his friend Rob about suspicions of anti-Semitism. The narrative line
continues in a fairly unbroken manner until in bed that night, Annie mentions Alvys
marriage to Allison propelling the narrative even further into the past.
So the film narrative continues to proceed in a digressive, associative, and nonsequential manner even when Alvys physical narrative voicein the form of
voiceover narrationhas been silenced for a time. I should emphasize that the
standup comedy format is very much relevant to why the film proceeds as it does.
Standup comedians are faced with the task of uniting a series of disparate jokes into a
coherent performance. The standup comedy narrative format is the natural result of
the need for cohesion.
The pattern continues until Alvy is shown to first make the acquaintance of Annie
on the tennis course through a mutual friend. Again, the sequence of the related events
does not match the sequence in which they are supposed to have happened. I will
follow Schatz in arguing that the narrative assumes a classical format once Alvy and
Annie have met. Schatz also argues that this classical format is closely associated with
Alvys sense of self-consciousness. Alvy seems to alternately retreat into and emerge
from the world of the film based on his degree of agitation.
During the segment of the film in Alvy and Annie are relatively happy, Alvy ignores
his audience and accepts the role of the oblivious subject of observation (this
sequence includes the dinner date, the bookstore scene, the Central Park scene, the
scene on the pier, etc.). After the romance between Alvy and Annie proceeds in a
fairly classical (i.e. sequential, straightforward) manner, irritants build up to such a
level as make it impossible for Alvy to go on ignoring his audience. During the dinner
scene with Annies family Alvy again directly addresses the film viewing audience
with comments about how different Annies family is from his. That is, once his
insecurities return, he reengages the audience in another comedic, faux session in
psychoanalysis.
Just a few scenes later, during an argument with Annie, Alvy briefly addresses the
film-viewing audience. Annie misspeaks, and says the word wife when she meant to
say life. Alvy attempts to correct her but she denies that she made the mistake. He
then turns to the camera and say she said, will it change my wife. You heard that
because you were there, so Im not crazy. In the very next scene, the relationship is
broken off and Alvy immediately begins addressing the audience, and then proceeds
to stop passersby on the street to ask them questions, flouting the illusory reality of
the world of the film, which he had previously been happy to preserve when the
relationship had been going relatively well.
The film soon returns to the classical narrative style though, when Annie calls
Alvy to kill a spider in her bathroom, and the two reconcile. We are taken sequentially
through the events that led up to the second breakup: the trip to Alvys old
neighborhood in Brooklyn, Annies birthday, the first encounter with Tony Lacy at the
nightclub, the psychoanalysis appointments, the trip to California, the breakup scene
on the plane and Annies subsequent move out. While this stretch of the film does
have experimental elements, the chronology of events is maintained and Alvy
confines his interactions to the filmic world. After the move out scene, the films
narrative very briefly returns to the standup comedy format, in which a conversation
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with an elderly woman in front of a movie theatre transports us to a previous attempt

by Alvy to date other women.
The events from this point on proceed in chronological order until the very end in
which Alvy directly addresses the camera to delver what Labov would call the coda:
Codas close off the sequence of complicating actions and indicate
that none of the events that followed were important to the narrative.
A chain of actions may be thought of as successive answers to the
question Then what happened?3
In this last monologue, Alvy assumes a different voice. He no longer speaks as a
standup comedian, but a proper narrator; one of the sort moviegoers are accustomed
to. This shows that transposition of narrative structure is relevant to Annie Hall,
because much of the film does in fact adhere to the classical narrative format. This is
precisely why I can argue that the standup comedy narrative format has been
recontextualized. Allen uses this narrative format to incorporate the neurotic stage
persona he has developed into the narrative style of portions of the film. In marking
the narrative in this way, Allen is allowed to convey Alvys emotional insecurity to
the audience.
Up to this point, I have only discussed the narrative structure of Annie Hall,
while paying little attention to patterns in its content. To do this, I will again return to
the joke I quoted at the opening of the paper. To those familiar with Woody Allens
work this joke should represent one of the hallmarks of his comedic style. During the
1960s, Allen developed a comedic persona of a neurotic who overemploys the
language of psychoanalytic therapy. Thus it was characteristic of Allen to sometimes
open his comedy routines by going over recent developments in his private life.
In making Annie Hall, Allens extensive use of this comedic device is one of the
features that mark the narrative format of the film as being the standup comedy
format. Whenever Alvy directs his speech toward his imagined audience, he usually
imparts information that could conceivably be brought up during a session with his
psychiatrist. That is, he uses the language of inner reference 4 to talk through his
problems, voicing his emotional insecurities and revisiting events from his past.
Particularly telling is one of Alvys lines in a conversation with Annie on her balcony
in which he says that needs to go to an appointment with his analyst an begin
whining. Later, when Alvy is depicted at an appointment with his psychiatrist he is
heard to be doing just that:
1. absolutely incredible
2. I-I-I tried everything, you know
3. I-I-I put on soft music and my red light bulb and
4. whats rea
5. heres the incredible thing,
6. the incredible thing about it is Im paying for her analysis,
7. and shes making progress,
8. and Im getting screwed
Several times throughout the film, when Alvy addresses the film-viewing
audience directly, he engages in this sort of talk. He whines constantly in the film
complaining about and attempting to evaluate his inexplicable plight in a series of
monologues directed at the film-viewing audience:
(1) Opening monologueAlvy puzzles over the question of what went wrong in
3 Goffman, pp. 365-366
4 Carr, E. Summerson. 2011. Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American
Sobriety. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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his relationship with Annie.

(2) At the movie theatre with AnnieAlvy complains to the audience about the
film critic immediately behind him in line who is screaming his opinions in
his ear.
(3) In the bedroom with first wife, AllisonAlvy attempts to make sense of the
failure of their marriage
(4) In the kitchen with AnnieAlvy maintains that Annie said wife and not
life.
(5) On the streetAlvy tries to figure out what he did to drive Annie away.
In this particular participation framework5 constructed by Woody Allen through
the film, the audience assumes a role similar to that of the psychiatrist, who is
expected to listen in silence. Of course, because this is a film, the audience does not
have the ability to interject. But it is the content of these utterances that attempts to
set up this metaphorical, albeit impotent, participation framework. Erving Goffman
developed a theory of verbal interaction in which the participants in a given
interaction was extended from the simple speaker-listener framework to include
intended over-hearers, circumstantial over-hearers, and eavesdroppers.
As I alluded to earlier in this paper, films can be said to possess participation
frameworks even though they are not face-to-face social interactions because the act
of filming assumes some audience, and film is a medium of communication. Thus,
the default participation framework for films seems to me to be one that involves
speakers who animate a text and their intended over-hearers: the film-viewing
audience. The participant framework in Annie Hall, while it cannot be truly
interactive, attempts to represent a participation framework that is interactive at times
(when Alvy addresses the camera), while maintaining the default framework at
others.
At several moments in Annie Hall, attention is drawn to the participation
frameworks internal to the film when the norms that govern behavior within those are
violated. This is part of the self-reflexivity that Schatz attributes to the film. But it is
also an extension of one of the key jokes of the Annie Hall that is embedded in the
narrative structure; namely, Allens signature artificial invocation of the (private)
psychoanalytic speech context in a public address to an audience. On one level, Alvy
engages his film audience. But on a lower level, the rules of participation frameworks
that are represented as internal to the film are occasionally violated.
One of the most poignant examples of this practice is during a scene in which
Alvy is standing in line with Annie at the movie theatre waiting to see The Sorrow
and the Pity. Annie and Alvy proceed to discuss there sexual issues in this close space
where the presence of over-hearers is assumed. Generally, conversations about such
topics are carried out in hushed voices when talked about in public, but Annie speaks
at a level more appropriate for a private space. Interestingly, and to comedic effect,
Allen contrasts this conversation with a contextually felicitous, albeit loud,
conversation (about the films of Marshall McLuhan) that irritates Alvy.
Another example occurs in a scene in which Alvy paces outside of a movie
theatre, despairing over his recent breakup with Annie much too loudly to be
felicitous. Passersby volunteer information about the activities and whereabouts of
Annie, and an older woman admonishes him for not moving on, suggesting that he
date other women. The passersby in this scene would be expected under normal
circumstances not to speak with Alvy at all, and let Alvy deal with his problems
alone. This scene is also contributes to the self-reflexivity of the film in that the
5 Goffman, Erving. 1979. Footing. Semiotica 25: 1-29.
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passersby offer information that they should not have known, and that was directly
relevant to the film, thereby exposing the illusory reality being represented.
In this paper I have argued that in making the film, Annie Hall, Woody Allen
transposes a narrative structure specific to standup comedy onto film. The overt
narrative voice, as well as the dialogue and editing adhere to a structure that is at time
digressive and thus non-sequential, but narrative nonetheless. Further, Allen marks
the narrative speech in this film based on a comedic device specific to his own
comedy: the artificial invocation of the psychoanalytic speech context.
As I analyzed the filmic narrative of this fascinating film, one question intrigued
me: what led Woody Allen to partially narrate the film in this way? Alvy is
represented as a comedian in this film. As a comedian, was it natural for Alvy to be
given a comedic narrative voice? Woody Allen himself had been a comedy writer
since he was a teenager, and Annie Hall is considered by many critics to be his first
non-parodic film. Could it be that the style in which he was accustomed to writing for
comedy bled through? Or was this transposition of narrative styles intentional? I do
not have a satisfying answer to this question.
Before closing this paper, I would like to discuss how language in Annie Hall
relates it to the societal context in which it was formed. In their book, Camera
Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film, Michael Ryan
and Douglas Kellner argued that in the history of Hollywood film, the 1960s was
period replete with the making of films with liberal messages, and experimentation
with filmic form. But the Vietnam War and economic decline in the 1970s triggered a
conservative backlash in film. Annie Hall was filmed in 1977, but it doesnt seem to
fall neatly within the general trend Ryan and Kellner pointed out. Rather, there are
both conservative and progressive elements in the film.
Based on the extensive discussion of form that was foregrounded in this paper, it
seems quite clear to me that on some level Annie Hall is a product of the flowering of
liberalism in Hollywood cinema in the 1960s. But the film still seems to be somewhat
conservative, especially with respect to its treatment of gender.
In a review of the film, Christopher J. Knight analyses the relationship between
Alvy and Annie, evaluating it as significantly one-sided. Alvy is always seen to
dominate the relationship, and is unyielding in his demands. He even goes on to say
that Alvy dominates the narrative of a film that is about Annie Hall. While I agree that
the relationship between Alvy and Annie has strong conservative undertones, I
disagree that the film is about Annie Hall. The film seems very clearly to me to be
Alvys story in that it is with Alvy that the audience is given to identify with. Annie
has no narrative voice whatever in the film.
The title of the film is deceptive because it is not meant to imply that the viewer
will be treated to a story about someone named Annie Hall. Rather, it implies a sort of
objectification of Annie Hall. Annie comes into the film as another of Alvys
conquests, someone for him to improve, and someone to look after his sexual and
emotional needs. Alvy never learns to respect Annie as his intellectual equal, and
regularly dismisses her ideas and opinions.
One of the key ways in which Alvys position in the relationship shows through
language use in the film. Annies dialect differs from Alvys both in terms of accent
and lexical choice. Alvy frequently berates Annie for using expressions like neat
and la-di-da. Because the film provides more background on Alvy than for Annie,
viewers are given to identify with Alvy more, and Annies dialect is subordinated to
his.
But on another level this film could be read as an attempt by Allen to critique the
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ridiculous nature of a contemporary type of romantic relationship. After all, Annie

changes while Alvy does not. When he makes fun of her dialect during a heated
argument, she replies, I dont care! She refuses to deal with him on his terms
indefinitely, and when his recalcitrance becomes unbearable she breaks up with him.
Annie in this way does exercise a degree of control in the relationship. When Annie
finally rejects him categorically, he broods over it for months and writes a play about
the relationship that accords with his fantasy.
Annie Hall is a complex film and interesting from a variety of analytical angles. I
have only scratched the surface in writing this paper. The films of Woody Allen
interest me in general, because they have a very textual quality about them that
remains consistent across the various forms he has experimented with. In researching
this for this paper, I was disappointed in the deficit in sociolinguistic literature on the
film, because it to be rich with patterns begging to be analyzed. I hope that in my
limited capacity, I have done this subject some justice.

References
Schatz, Thomas. Annie Hall and the Issue of Modernism.
Knight, Chistopher J.Woody Allens Annie Hall: Galateas Triumph Over
Pygmalion.
Labov, William. 1972. The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax.
Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, pp. 359-360.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Shoaps, Robin. 2002. Pray Earnestly: The Textual Construction of Personal
Involvement in Pentacostal Prayer and Song. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
12(1): 34-71.
Goffman, Erving. 1979. Footing. Semiotica 25: 1-29.
Carr, E. Summerson. 2011. Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and
American Sobriety. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ryan, Michael, and Douglass Kellner. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of
Contemporary Hollywood Film.

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