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Marshall McLuhan cameo in Annie Hall
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- from Annie Hall (1977)
- Created by Woody Allen
- Posted byAla' Diab
In this classic scene from Annie Hall, Woody Allen breaks the fourth wall, speaking to the camera and producing Marshall McLuhan from behind a movie poster.
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Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall
by Steve AndersonThis scene serves as evidence of Marshall McLuhan's status as a cultural icon of the 1970s
By 1977, the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan had achieved the status of a cultural icon that far transcended his original discipline of mass communications. In this scene from Woody Allen's Best Picture-winning Annie Hall, McLuhan makes a cameo appearance as himself to silence a pedantic media professor. The actual contents of McLuhan's dialogue in the film are somewhat enigmatic, however. In chastizing the Columbia professor McLuhan says, "you mean my whole fallacy is wrong!" an ironic bit of wordplay that was characteristic of McLuhan's later work, which sought to extend, challenge and expand his own theories, preventing them from becoming ossified or reduced to simple catch-phrases. Perhaps the most obvious example is his book, the Medium is the Massage (1967), which was a collaboration with designer Quentin Fiore.
Diegetic rupture in Annie Hall
by Steve AndersonIn this scene from Annie Hall, Woody Allen ruptures the diegetic continuity of the film to produce the real-world Marshall McLuhan
This scene is a classic example of what narrative theorist Northrop Frye called "metalepsis," that is, the intrusion of extradiegetic elements into the world created by a film. When Woody Allen interrupts his conversation with a pedantic media professor to address the camera directly, he violates one of the classic rules of cinematic form; however, when Marshall McLuhan appears in the scene, playing himself, we momentarily experience both McLuhan as McLuhan and Woody Allen as Woody Allen. The effect of metalepsis, according to Frye is to induce in the audience an awareness of the multiple layers of reality and of storytelling that are present in any narrative experience.