Mortality Movies by Woody Allen

Death has been a recurring theme in Woody Allen’s films for decades. Sometimes it appears as a punchline. Sometimes it triggers a full-blown existential crisis. And sometimes it lurks in the background while characters worry about love, sex, illness, God, meaning, and whether anyone really knows what they are doing here.

In Episode Two of Mortality Movies, host Gail Rubin, The Doyenne of Death®, is joined by death doula Danielle Slupesky and death educator Jane Westbrook to examine how Allen’s films use humor to explore mortality. The episode looks at clips from Love and Death, Annie Hall, and Hannah and Her Sisters, along with some of Allen’s most memorable lines about dying.

The subject matter is serious, but the approach is often comic. That is part of what makes these films useful for death education. Humor can create breathing room around subjects people often avoid. When audiences laugh, they may also become more willing to think, talk, and ask questions.

Laughing at the Big Questions

The episode opens with Love and Death, Allen’s 1975 comedy inspired by Russian literature, philosophy, war, and mortality. The young Boris Grushenko contemplates life, death, girls, and the apparent absurdity of existence.

The film is filled with philosophical jokes, but beneath the silliness is a very human anxiety: What is life for? What happens when it ends? And why do we spend so much time worrying about things we cannot control?

By placing those questions inside a comedy, Love and Death makes existential dread easier to approach. It turns fear into farce, which may be one of the oldest human coping mechanisms.

Books, Romance, and the Denial of Death

In Annie Hall, Allen’s character Alvy Singer brings mortality into a budding relationship with Annie by encouraging her to read The Denial of Death and Death and Western Thought. It is funny because it is socially awkward. It is also revealing.

Most people do not lead with death anxiety when trying to nurture a romance. Alvy does.

That brief scene captures one of Allen’s recurring comic personas: the person who cannot stop intellectualizing mortality long enough to enjoy the moment. Death is not merely an eventual reality. It is an intrusive thought, a lens through which every relationship, pleasure, and decision is filtered.

For death educators, this scene offers a useful contrast. Talking about death can be healthy, liberating, and even relationship-building. But obsessing about death without using that awareness to live more fully can become paralyzing.

The Health Scare That Becomes a Spiritual Crisis

In Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey Sachs fears he may have a life-threatening illness. When he learns that he is physically fine, he does not relax. Instead, the scare launches him into a deeper crisis about the meaning of life.

This is one of the most relatable mortality movie moments. A health scare, even one that turns out to be nothing, can change a person’s sense of safety. Suddenly, the body feels fragile. Time feels shorter. The ordinary routines of life no longer seem ordinary.

Mickey begins searching for answers. He explores religion, belief, and the possibility of God, including a memorable attempt to investigate Catholicism that alarms his Jewish parents. The humor comes from the cultural and family collision, but the underlying issue is sincere: when mortality becomes real, people often look for a framework that can hold their fear.

Allen, a known admirer of Ingmar Bergman, also cast Max Von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters. Von Sydow famously played the knight who challenges Death to a chess match in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, featured in Episode One of Mortality Movies. That connection makes the film especially fitting for this series. The shadow of Bergman’s cinematic Death hangs over Allen’s comedic universe.

Immortality, Avoidance, and One-Liners

Allen’s films and public quotes often return to the same central anxiety: not wanting to die. Two of his most famous lines capture this perfectly: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying,” and “I’m not afraid of dying… I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

These jokes work because they reveal a common truth. Many people are not just afraid of being dead. They are afraid of the process, the loss of control, the unknown, and the idea of nonexistence.

In Love and Death, even the closing moments return to the twin obsessions of sex and death. The film’s final reflection includes the wonderfully bleak joke: “There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?”

It is a classic comic reversal. Death may be terrifying, but so are many of the tedious indignities of life.

What Comedy Can Teach Us About Mortality

Episode Two of Mortality Movies shows how comedy can serve as an unexpected doorway into death awareness. Allen’s characters may be neurotic, fearful, and overwhelmed, but their anxieties are recognizable. They ask questions many people carry quietly: What if I get sick? What happens after death? Does life have meaning? Can love distract us from mortality, or does mortality make love more urgent?

The films do not offer simple answers. Instead, they invite viewers to sit with the questions.

That may be one of the most valuable things mortality movies can do. They give us a shared language for conversations that might otherwise feel too heavy to begin.

Want to Watch Mortality Movies Without Jumping Between Screens?

Become a paid subscriber to Mortality Movies with The Doyenne of Death® on Substack and get access to the complete 30-minute episodes with the film clips included.

Instead of pausing the show to search for clips on YouTube, paid subscribers can watch each episode seamlessly from start to finish. No searching. No switching tabs. No interruptions.

Just sit back, enjoy the movies, and discover what they can teach us about death, dying, grief, and living life fully.

Subscribe to Mortality Movies with The Doyenne of Death® on Substack here.

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