Movies might not necessarily have rules, but there’s a helluva lot of guidelines: your main character must live through most of the film, don’t break the 180 line, keep it under five hours. But it’s pretty exciting when a film does break these things, like with Psycho, Requiem for a Dream, or Empire (an eight hour movie that is just filming the Empire State Building).

There’s a general guideline that movies must stay within the confines of their reality or we’ll lose the audience. In other words, you can’t break the fourth wall.

Maybe in an art movie (like a Fellinini one) it can happen, but in a romantic comedy you don’t expect the characters to observe one of their memories like a TV show or for someone to pull Marshall McLuhan out from behind a sign to prove a point. Yet, this one can get away with that and much more. This week, I want to talk about how this movie breaks this forbidden fourth wall and keeps the audience for every step.

Here we are with 1977’s Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen.

Announcing it early

It’s super important that if you’re going to break reality like this, you do so right away, so that the audience is prepared to suspend their disbelief. If they get too settled with the fourth wall there, you might lose some when you break through it.

Annie Hall does that in it’s first scene as Woody Allen talks directly to the camera, telling jokes. This lets us know right away that this movie will get as meta as it wants,especially since the writer/ director of it is engaging the audience directly.. 

It sets the tone well too, telling jokes that are both comedic and philosophical at the same time.

Layering with laughs

Another important thing to do when breaking reality like this is having an emotion mixed with it, so that the departures feel purposeful.

When Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas does it, it’s usually creating bewilderment. When Funny Games does it, it’s usually creating terror. And when Annie Hall does it, it’s creating comedy.

Like the scene of all the kids talking about what they’re going to become when they grow up is so funny (and dark), we’re so on board for it. We never are taken out of the subtext subtitle scene because almost every line is amusing.

More emotion=more investment. And it’s these times when you risk the audience’s disbelief that you want it the most.

Mixing it with the message

All in all there should be a reason you’re making the choice to break the fourth wall, and it’s best if the movie’s message correlates with it.

I believe the main message of Annie Hall is “relationships can be both a source of happiness and misery.” His joke at the beginning about the terrible food in such small portions really reinforces this.

And the “I’d never join any club that would have me as a member quote” really points out how we all are, in reality, the ones creating this misery for ourselves.

This is a very self-reflecting message, and therefore, the meta parts of the movie seems crucial. Most of us can relate to the message--especially when we peer into our own souls like how Annie Hall does.

So maybe if you pulled Woody Allen out from behind a sign right now, he’d tell me that this was not his intention at all, and I don’t understand his work.

But creating worlds like this, worlds bold enough to break away from our own, is part of what excites me as a writer/ filmmaker, and I can at least tell you that these lessons are true for me. You can break the rules all you want. Please please break the rules (you know, of course, once you’re an expert in them). But when you do you need to take extra care to not lose your audience. 

Or screw it! Maybe you can lose them or win them back. Or you can filter out the people that aren’t your audience in the first place. And maybe having that unique Alvy/ Annie relationship with the audience is finding your own vision and your own way to tell your story, guidelines be damned.

Thanks for reading!

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