12 Notes about Fiction Through the Lens of “Annie” (1982)
General theories for analyzing films, novels, plays, poems, and short stories.
Annie (1982) has deep historical roots. Technically speaking, Annie is an adaptation of a Broadway musical, which is an adaptation of a comic strip. On a broader level, Annie is an adaptation — or retelling — of countless and very old stories centered around a character searching for a home with love and acceptance. All these stories reflect the hopes and fears of the context in which they originate as underscored by Barbara Hales. Such contextualization also makes works of fiction unique historical primary sources. What can Annie tell us about the United States during the late 1970s/early 1980s? What are the consequences of Annie effectively being a historical stand-in for all orphans? Is Annie even fiction?
Matilda the Musical (2022) responds to Annie. Intertextuality is everywhere in fiction. One of my favorite recent examples is how we go from “When I’m stuck with a day that’s grey and lonely / I just stick up my chin and grin and say, oh / The sun’ll come out tomorrow” (“Tomorrow”) in Annie to a message that challenges the status quo in Matilda the Musical, “Just because you find that life’s not fair / It doesn’t mean that you just have to grin and bear it / If you always take it on the chin and wear it / Nothing will change” (“When I Grow Up”).
No one criticizes Annie’s Aileen Quinn for not being an orphan. Representation in literature is vital and far too often reflects only the privileged. (I’m constantly frustrated that fiction never has anyone who looks anything like me due to the impacts of Neurofibromatosis.) It’s commonplace for a seeing actor to play a blind character in television and in film. But appropriately playing a professional role basically always involves learning and embodying characteristics and identities specific to that role. Aileen Quinn does not and cannot understand being Annie The Orphan in the same way that Meryl Streep does not and cannot understand being a teacher in Music of the Heart (1999) and in the same way that Ghilherme Lobo cannot understand being blind while playing Leonardo in The Way He Looks (2014).
Annie never uses the bathroom. I’ve long enjoyed thinking about what specifically is and is not included within a story. And inspired by Bradly Irish’s work, my curiosity extends to the disgust. In Annie (and in most fiction), we never see characters using the bathroom. Given that a text only includes what is included, what are the implications of most fictional characters never needing to use the restroom or even mentioning it?
Annie never becomes an old woman. Fiction, again, only specifically includes the details provided via the page, speaker, or reel. Characters in fiction have isolated, limited existences. In Annie, we never see Warbucks (Albert Finney) as a newborn baby; thus, he was never a baby. In the concluding lyrics, the “forever” in “together forever” effectively only lasts a few more minutes. We can, however, speculate about what might happen before and after the story’s timeline.
Annie has hundreds, thousands even, of uncredited actors. As evidenced by the mise-en-scène and the small number of minor characters and extras, there are people managing the stores, running the electricity, keeping the streets clean, etc. Such implied or off-stage actions with characters who exist just off-stage are important, if intangible. This is even more important in printed fiction such as in the collection of short stories Everything Begins and Ends at The Kentucky Club (Benjamin Alire Sáenz, 2012). I have asked my students, what other characters are implied to be present in the scenes at The Kentucky Club (i.e., a popular bar)?
Annie’s most vital character is unseen and only briefly mentioned. “Mother dear / Oh, we know you’re down there listening / How can we follow / Your sweet advice to // Easy street.” Miss Hannigan and Rooster’s mother has a negative imprint on seemingly all of the named characters in the story. (This is assuming they provide reliable information about their mother!) Off-stage background is important, too. What about all the people Warbucks steps on (and that the story erases) in the process of becoming the richest person in the nation?
Annie (2014) exists in a world without Annie (1982). Fiction always requires a suspension of disbelief. Accelerated timelines characteristic of most fiction are one component of this suspension. This disbelief can extend to the erasure of historical reality. The original Annie film is such a landmark film that the characters in the most recent re-make should know that they are recreating a classic work but they don’t.
Billed as a children’s movie, Annie hints at an unspeakably evil world. Annie is comical, beautiful (the choreography!), tragic, scary, and heartwarming at different times. The contrasts between Warbucks’s stature and Miss Hannigan’s desperate ploys are absolute. Their connections to power and recognition are profoundly different. Related to this, I have wondered if literature and art, even when depicting evil, before c. 1940 has a kind of innocence that is now impossible, even in the most comical scenes, given the horrors of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb.
Annie: Out of one, many. A play on “out of many, one,” I often think about how a novelist will create all the characters in their novel. What kind of unconscious connections exist between even the most contrasting characters? Film complicates the equation some, as makeup and costume departments (to give only two examples) play a role in authorship. Nonetheless, Annie and Grace do not exist as real people, and they are created by the same team. Why do Annie and Grace exist as they do? Why is the story structured where Grace selects Annie (and Annie gets Grace to select her)?
Annie‘s silent characters are the loudest. The camera is a powerful tool of interpretation and for communication. Crowds surround Grace as she arrives at and then leaves the Hudson St. Home for Girls with Annie. These characters are mostly silent. Their silence and body language as captured by the camera say more about their economic plight than words could. Further, objects function as a kind of silent character, too. Consider the horizontal bars across the windows as Annie’s friends bid her farewell.
Annie shapes the historical unconscious. Beyond entertainment, Annie shapes how children and adults think about and visualize the Great Depression. It subtly teaches them to celebrate capitalism, grandeur, and excess. Similar to the narrator’s words in Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952) about the impacts the historical unconscious has on him: “I turned and stared again at the jumble, no longer looking at what was before my eyes, but inwardly-outwardly, around a corner into the dark, far-away-and-long-ago, not so much of my own memory as of remembered words, of linked verbal echoes, images, heard even when not listening at home.”
Andrew Joseph Pegoda, PhD, teaches Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Religious Studies; and English at the University of Houston. Visit Pegoda online, https://andrewpegoda.com or @AJP_PhD.
