Annie Hall Scene 5 Summary

  • Cut to Alvy and Annie in the kitchen of a seaside house. The lobsters they brought home for dinner have gotten loose. That's right: The crustaceans have gone wild.
  • Alvy's freaked out. Annie picks up a lobster and waves it in his face. Alvy wants to try to scoot a lobster out from behind the fridge with a large pole. Annie grabs her camera and asks Alvy to pose with the shellfish. Neither of them can stop laughing.
  • Alvy and Annie go for a stroll on the beach at dusk. He asks her if he's her first big romance, and she says nope.
  • Montage time. It's Annie's dating history. As she walks Alvy through the great loves of her life, we see snippets of each in flashbacks, starting with her high school boyfriend, Dennis.
  • Then there's Jerry the actor she dated last year. We see a slightly younger Annie with Jerry at a party. Present-day Alvy and Annie enter the scene, too, and observe younger Annie and Jerry's conversation. It's not unlike the Ghost of Christmas Past's gig from A Christmas Carol.
  • Alvy thinks Jerry's full of it. And creepy. We'd tend to agree; he's as phony as a $3 bill. Annie blames it on her youth.
  • Cut back to the beach. The camera's movement puts us in Alvy's and Annie's shoes as they keep walking. Alvy gives Annie guff about her Midwestern upbringing. Annie mentions that Alvy's been married twice. We feel another flashback coming on, Shmoopers.
  • We were right. This time, we flash back to Alvy and his second wife, Robin, at a party. She's a pretentious, namedropping writer who wants to work the room. He wants to watch the Knicks game on TV.
  • When Robin finds Alvy watching the b-ball game in a bedroom, she gets ticked off. When he tries to initiate some hanky-panky, she gets really ticked off. What would the people in the other room think?
  • Cut to Robin and Alvy in their own bed. Robin says the police sirens are making it too hard for her to concentrate; her therapist says she should live in the country.
  • Alvy rattles off a list of reasons why he could never live in the country; it includes everything from dead moths to the Manson Family.
  • Robin shrieks that she needs a Valium because she's so tense.