"We Need the Eggs"

Lin and I had this brief exchange about relationships in the comments of the “Advice for Women” post below. I mentioned that “school’s out” for me where relationships are concerned, she countered with (I’m paraphrasing) “Don’t give up; your new Best Friend is out there.” The exchange got me to thinking about relationships in general and my favorite quote about relationships, specifically. The quote is from Woody Allen’s best-ever movie “Annie Hall.” It’s the bit where Allen's character encounters a couple on the street, walks up to them and says something to the effect of “You look like a happy couple. What’s your secret?” The woman responds with “I’m basically shallow and don’t have a lot to say.” The man validates her statement with a “me, too” sort of response… taking the point about mutual compatibility to its (hilarious) extreme. That one quick scene has stuck with me all these intervening years. As have many, many other scenes from that movie, but that’s another story.

So…I went looking for that particular quote. And I found it, Gentle Reader, but the scene from the movie was overdubbed in Russian and the English is simply overwhelmed…you can’t hear it at all. Too bad, that. (But if you really wanna see the clip, it’s here.) These excerpts are from the same movie…and they’re not all that bad, but they’re certainly NOT what I was going after. The first clip is the ending of the movie, the second is the opening.

Ah yes, we need the eggs… except for those of us who are allergic to the damned things. Unlike eggs (in real life there are non-egg eggs), there ain't no suitable substitutes when it comes to relationships: it's the “real thing” or nothing. Aside from kidding yourself, you're only setting yourself up for massive failure if or when you settle for a “substitute” relationship. I don't have empirical proof of this “fact” from personal experience, this is simply my thought on the subject.

Now…the movie's intro:

Allen’s monolog kinda sorta reflects my current attitude, with the emphasis on “sorta.” Heavy emphasis on “sorta.”

“Annie Hall” is my favorite movie of all time, and it’s the only movie I’ve ever seen more than twice. The Second Mrs. Pennington and I, coincidentally, saw “Annie Hall” as a first run movie, we saw it again at a Notre Dame film night during her senior year, and watched it again and again as the years passed by. Aside from being brilliantly funny, it might be the most pertinent and poignant movie about relationships I’ve ever seen. Keep in mind, though, I went off movies about 15 years ago, so I’m not one to offer up criticism in this space. Not hardly — not at all, actually.

But…FWIW… Woody Allen never produced another movie equal to this one, IMHO. And I’ve seen most of his work.