Editing Annie Hall (section)

====Psychoanalysis and modernism====
''Annie Hall'' has been cited as a film which uses both therapy and analysis for comic effect.<ref name="Media2002">{{cite book|title=Psychoanalysis|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qp_bmDWpReoC&pg=PT7|date=May 1, 2002|publisher=Lichtenstein Creative Media|isbn=978-1-888064-82-7|page=7|access-date=September 29, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140629171334/http://books.google.com/books?id=qp_bmDWpReoC&pg=PT7|archive-date=June 29, 2014|url-status=live}}</ref> [[Sam B. Girgus]] considers ''Annie Hall'' to be a story about memory and retrospection, which "dramatizes a return via narrative desire to the repressed and the unconscious in a manner similar to psychoanalysis".<ref name="Girgus02">{{harvnb|Girgus|2002|pp=50–2}}</ref> He argues that the film constitutes a self-conscious assertion of how narrative desire and humor interact in the film to reform ideas and perceptions and that Allen's deployment of Freudian concepts and humor forms a "pattern of skepticism toward surface meaning that compels further interpretation". Girgus believes that proof of the pervasiveness of [[Sigmund Freud]] in the film is demonstrated at the beginning through a reference to a joke in ''[[Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious]]'', and makes another joke about a psychiatrist and patient, which Girgus argues is also symbolic of the dynamic between humor and the unconscious in the film.<ref name="Girgus02"/> Further Freudian concepts are later addressed in the film with Annie's recall of a dream to her psychoanalyst in which [[Frank Sinatra]] is smothering her with a pillow, which alludes to Freud's belief in dreams as "visual representations of words or ideas".<ref name="Girgus02"/>

Peter Bailey in his book ''The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen'', argues that Alvy displays a "genial denigration of art" which contains a "significant equivocation", in that in his self-deprecation he invites the audience to believe that he is leveling with them.<ref name="Bailey">{{harvnb|Bailey|2001|pp=37–8}}</ref> Bailey argues that Allen's devices in the film, including the subtitles which reveal Annie's and Alvy's thoughts "extend and reinforce ''Annie Hall''{{'}}s winsome ethos of plain-dealing and ingenuousness".<ref name="Bailey"/> He muses that the film is full of antimimetic emblems such as McLuhan's magical appearance which provide quirky humor and that the "disparity between mental projections of reality and actuality" drives the film. His view is that self-reflective cinematic devices intelligently dramatize the difference between surface and substance, with visual emblems "incessantly distilling the distinction between the world mentally constructed and reality".<ref name="Bailey"/>

In his discussion of the film's relation to [[modernism]], Thomas Schatz finds the film an unresolved "examination of the process of human interaction and interpersonal communication"<ref name="schatz186">{{harvnb|Schatz|1982|p=186}}</ref> and "immediately establishes [a] self-referential stance" that invites the spectator "to read the narrative as something other than a sequential development toward some transcendent truth".<ref>{{harvnb|Schatz|1982|p=183}}</ref> For him, Alvy "is the victim of a tendency toward overdetermination of meaning – or in modernist terms 'the tyranny of the signified' – and his involvement with Annie can be viewed as an attempt to establish a spontaneous, intellectually unencumbered relationship, an attempt which is doomed to failure."<ref name="schatz186"/>