“Can I confess something? I tell you this because as an artist, I think you’ll understand. Sometimes when I’m driving… on the road at night… I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The… flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.”
Before the Deer Hunter Oscar, there was Duane. Predating Fatboy Slim, the Tarantino flirtation, and More Cowbell – long before his signature style gave birth to an icon – he took his one scene, modest pay, and absence of anything resembling a guarantee and built the foundations of a near fifty-year career in an industry that never should have allowed him in the door. Far from conventionally attractive (even in his salad days, he was stringy and gaunt), his halting, unnerving line delivery certainly doomed him to the margins, but he never let the absence of leading man status deter his ambition. He’d always be the creep, the loner, the man out of time, but never, ever the type to quicken a pulse. If he dared dabble in romance, it would have to be for laughs. Dozens of parts later, he’s cornered his own market. There’s a “Christopher Walken” type, locked away for all time, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.
But this is not a career summary. A wrapping up. An AFI tribute so he’ll have something for retirement. No, this is back to the beginning. An origin story. A starting point for a man we all know and love because, frankly, there’s no one else like him. Though he had a few minor walk-ons before his turn as Duane, it’s more than fair to start the clock with Annie Hall. 1977’s improbable Best Picture winner (not a chance it beats Star Wars if the voters were given another crack at it) is, for most, Woody Allen’s crowning achievement (I won’t argue, but I’m still a Crimes and Misdemeanors man). It not only gave us Diane Keaton’s Oscar-winning role, Paul Simon as a heavy, and Jeff Goldblum forgetting his mantra, it dared to believe that what American audiences craved most of all was an Ibsen reference while two people fooled around in bed. To say nothing of a Marshall McLuhan cameo so perfectly timed, we wonder why no one had thought of it before.
In the midst of all this, stands Duane. Sits, more accurately. On his bed, waiting desperately for someone to stop by so he can share his maniacal secret (the quote that began this review). He is Annie’s brother, still living at home, most decidedly disturbed, but never explained in any conventional way. He has his own room, so he’s not on some weekend pass from the nuthouse, but what might he reveal about the Hall family? Woody’s Alvy has them pegged as slavishly conventional (boat basins, swap meets, anti-Semitic grandmothers), but would Norman Rockwell’s version of Chippewa Falls have included a sociopathic kinsman? If Mother and Father Hall produced that, who’s to say Annie herself isn’t but a crisis away from a similar fate?
Maybe she’s already there. She’s sweet and kind and soft-spoken, but as a flashback revealed, she once dated a hippie carved straight from Duane’s peculiar brand of marble. “Touch my heart….with your foot,” he mutters, as if channeling brother dear himself. Maybe Annie harbored incestuous longings. As cinema’s longest serving and most devoted Freudian, Woody was certainly inclined to agree. And after meeting Duane in the flesh, there remained no room for doubt. Annie was and is the prototypical Arch Kook (with apologies to Petulia), and it took a weekend in Wisconsin for Alvy to have the full picture at last. Which makes his continued pursuit that much more baffling. And exactly what we’re going to get in a Woody Allen movie. Love is more than blind, it’s downright insane. The worse they are for us, the harder we charge ahead. As the bittersweet coda tells us, we need the eggs. More than the air we breathe.
So yes, we celebrate Duane because he’s the devil on Alvy’s shoulder. The canary in his coal mine. Annie is flighty, shallow, and all too willing to twist and contort herself into whatever a man wants, and it’s all there in bold, capital letters. Lacking guile, she’s incapable of mystery. Genes are destiny, and the child is father to the man. Works the same for mothers. But if the film is about anything, it’s the fallacy that we can ever be logical and wise in the face of amour. She not only has a type, Alvy, she’s its living embodiment. Anything you claim to like about her is simply her catastrophic self-esteem in full surrender. She hasn’t a thought, idea, or interest of her own, save pleasing her perceived better. If she read your book about death, it’s because you insisted. She preferred the one about cats. Still does, despite your heroic efforts.
Technically, Duane does have another scene. He remains silent, but he’s there, fully himself, driving Alvy and Annie to the airport. After his unhinged monologue, it speaks volumes that Alvy still got in that car, and on a rainy night no less. He’s petrified, but present. Perhaps it’s his way of saying that as dangerous as Duane surely is on the highways and backroads of the Dairy State, his own driving would be worse. And as Annie’s earlier recklessness behind the wheel proved, she’s no better. Or, in a more likely explanation, Alvy’s decision to let Duane drive is akin to his desire to continue seeing Annie. It’s almost certainly a death wish, but let’s do it anyway. Doomed to fail, but hey, why not? Why not? Nine in ten cite the same for their own romantic endeavors, and it beats thinking. Few of us have our own Duane to ward away the demons, but it wouldn’t matter if we had. Damn those eggs to hell.
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