His lack of ability to truly inhabit space is especially striking in California, where the mise en scene highlights expanse and freedom, showcasing the bright colors, blue skies, never ending palm trees, wide lawns and glass houses of the LA dream, even if it does so in a distinctly ironic register (and you might want to think about how the film achieves its ironic distance in the California scenes)
In contrast, Alvy remains dressed in a dowdy brown (he notices at the party that both his friend Rob and a potential date are wearing all white). While at the intellectual party in New York with his second wife Robin Alvy was uncomfortable and bored, he does control the space, walking through the apartment the party is being held in and he is followed by a meandering, mobile camera. In contrast, at the California party he remains hovering on the edges, and the camera stays still. Neither Alvy nor the cinema audience can truly enter California society. On his second visit to California to reclaim Annie, Alvy's lack of ease in the vast calfironia space is further highlighted. He is first shown to us cooped up in a telephone box, secondly crashing his car (the scenes of him crashing the car are interspersed with scenes of the dodgems of his Brooklyn childhood, reducing the adult car to a child's fairground ride and infantilizing the adult Alvy), and of course finally a prison cell, from which he has to be rescued by Rob, whose ridiculous outfit, mocked by Alvy, also suggests the ways in which the permanent sunshine of the outdoors California lifestyle is not all it is cracked up to be. .
Alvy, then, suffers from and yet is in thrall to modernity. What does that sentence mean? Modernity is a critical and historical moment that is associated primarily with the nineteenth and early twentieth century and spawned an artistic and cultural response known as Modernism. Modernity is characterized by what the nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire termed the new, the fleeting, the contingent: everything that could, would change.