Pretend it's a whole world

Review: Pretend It's a City (Netflix)

My friend and fellow comedian Simon King used to do a bit on stage (back when we used to do bits on stages) about how the United States of America was the only nation on earth which both loudly trumpeted to all and sundry that it was the “greatest country in the world” and complained constantly about people trying to sneak in. Simon suggested, reasonably enough, that you could pick one, but not do both (one of the very few silver linings to the civilizational decline in American politics over recent years has been that one no longer hears quite as much crowing about being “the greatest country in the world”; time will tell if it’s one of the things that President Biden is able to bring back, like climate policy, friendly phone calls to global allies, and World Policeman status).

For decades, the USA’s national water’s warm/stay the fuck out attitude has been reproduced at the municipal level by its leading city, New York, a town whose cultural luminaries refuse to stop either producing paeans to the historically and geographically unparalleled greatness and sophistication of the place they live, or bemoaning the presence of the yokels, tourists, yuppies, and strivers who flock to it as an inevitable result. Say what you will about the so-contemptuous-it-comes-back-around-to-charming attitude that Parisians have for the international tourists upon whom they are absolutely and utterly dependent for their material well-being, but when was the last time a Parisian told you how great Paris was? Any poetic waxing about the City of Lights that’s likely to come to mind was probably written fifty to a hundred years ago, just as likely by Hemingway as by anyone with unpasteurized dairy in their bloodstream, and the burg’s 21st-century denizens are still just passively basking in it, like reading Le Monde Diplomatique from the light cast by a distant and already dead star. But from New York? It’s “Start Spreading the News,” baby — it’s When Harry Met Sally, “On Broadway,” Manhattan, “Empire State of Mind,” and a million and one other songs and films, the implied subtitles of which are all: We’d be sorry you live where you do, but New Yorkers don’t have time for sentimentality like contrition! Ooh!! Now what’s with all the fucking tourists in this city we won’t shut up about?!

“Pretend it’s a city,” New Yorker Fran Lebowitz says rhetorically, admonishing an imaginary rube, map-outstretched, blocking the crosswalk — and from this Martin Scorcese draws the title of his new Netflix miniseries documentary, Pretend It’s a City; his second documentary about Lebowitz, following 2010’s Public Speaking. The writer and the director clearly have a great deal of affection for each other, which is one of the things that makes the new series bearable, but also likely explains its back-slapping, blinkered quality. The first two episodes are filled with the kinds of self-congratulating, ain’t-I-a-stinker?, telling-it-like-is sophistications like the eponymous one. At a certain point, when asked if she’s a snob, Lebowitz smiles and insists insouciantly that she’s not a snob about things like “who’s your father?” or “where did you go to school?,” but rather about things like “Do you agree with me?” and “You think that?!” The line is delivered like she’s throwing a banana cream pie into a wealthy dowager’s kisser, or hurtling a Molotov cocktail of punk-bohemian truth into a line of square riot cops — as though there were any of the former kind of snobs left anywhere, in the year 2021, outside of the shrunken, inbred tide-pools of the Social Register, the Family Compact, and European aristocracy; as though the latter kind of snobbery were totally benign, if not positively constructive, rather than being precisely the instrument of culture hegemony wielded by elites across the North Atlantic world. Oh, you don’t care who someone’s father is? Cool — neither does literally anyone else in a neoliberalized version of capitalism that has been high on its own meritocratic mythology for the better part of forty years. Funnily enough, though, somehow the people with rich and powerful dads are all still doing okay. Turns out most of them either agree with you, or don’t think that — or can, at the very least, convincingly fake it for the duration of a political-intellectual fad.

The snobbery/reverse-snobbery Ourosbouros involving sophisticated urban America (epitomized in New York) and dumbshit heartland rural-suburban America (epitomized in… Applebees? Christmas? Fossil fuel consumption?) is long and complicated. But the posture deployed by Lebowitz is one captured most undisguisedly in a 2004 essay by columnist Dan Savage:

We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland "values" like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country. And we are the real Americans. They--rural, red-state voters, the denizens of the exurbs--are not real Americans. They are rubes, fools, and hate-mongers.

The idea is that certain kinds of genteel sneering, when deployed on behalf of even more primal, first principle equalities, are, actually, virtuous. One of the thorniest things about this dynamic is that, sometimes, it is both correct and compelling. To take an easy and apolitical example from the 1996 film Big Night, it’s virtually impossible not to side with Tony Shalhoub’s purist, immigrant Italian chef when he refuses to serve pasta alongside risotto to a demanding customer — “Maybe, I should make a mashed potato, for on the other side?” It is less helpful, on the other hand, when the muckrakers of Vanity Fair do Trump’s populist posturing for him with headlines like, “Joe Biden Wastes No Time Scrubbing the Cheeto Stains Out of Nation’s Collective Rug.” There’s a sleight of hand by which the righteous defence of Gay New York against Homophobic America, or Multiethnic New York against Cornfed Nativist America, shades first into the more ambiguous celebration of Secular New York against Religious America, or Cultured New York against Provincial America, before simply spilling over into Rich New York taking a shit on Oxycontin America.

“Who leaves New York when they’re 18? That’s who you have here,” said Lebowitz, in reference to former Democratic presidential primary candidate Bernie Sanders, on Bill Maher’s Real Time in 2017. (Which of the above modes is she operating in? Which version of the city is she defending, and which version of the country is she indicting?) “What are you, looking around thinking, ‘No, I can’t make it here. I’m going to Vermont.’”It will be interesting to see, now that Bernie has entered his mitten-meme dotage — in which the “angry” hand gestures that were once seen as a form of lateral violence have all been forgiven — how many of the people who made a point of publicly hating Sanders up to this point might suddenly discover a new affection for the senator. Regardless, this was not the case when Lebowitz was on Real Time, and denounced him as “an unbelievably irritating narcissistic old man.” The inner workings of psychology are notoriously impermeable to the home television audience, but it seems to me safe to assume that whenever somebody in cuff links calls somebody who isn’t in cuff links a narcissist, there may be some projection at play. Particularly if one is about to start shooting the second documentary about oneself by Martin Scorcese.

Fran Lebowitz is funny, and has some terrific stories about her decades in the city, and she’s pretty good about avoiding the worst pitfalls of nostalgia. At one point, demonstrating the kind of meta self-awareness that is all too rare whenever people talk about their cities, she points out that she thinks of the “real” New York as being the city as it was in the 1970s, because that’s how it was when she first knew it; she assumes that the same will be the case for the people discovering the town the way it is now. Later on, she makes an echoing remark about the way we all feel about the popular music of our youths — it seems to matter as much when we encounter something as what, precisely, it is. That said, she also admits that young people are constantly asking her about life in New York in the seventies, in a way that she never thought to ask previous generations about life in the city in the thirties. Which is too bad, because as many authors and documentarians have pointed out, the multiracial, American-born and immigrant, working- and middle-class and even enlightened bourgeois people living in the city at that time built a social democratic infrastructure that made the city the vibrant place that it was; and the neoliberal unraveling of that project, which began in the 1970s and which Lebowitz has a long and laudable record of lambasting, is what has led to what many have mourned as the diminishment of a still-undeniably-special town. But then, nothing rhymes with “still-undeniably-special.”

I’ve only been to New York once, and have always wanted to go back. By a strange series of events, I ended up visiting after making a short trip to Istanbul (once Constantinople — now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople; why did Constantinople get the works? It’s not my job to educate you!). After the visit, I remember being struck by the perfectly pretentious thought that everyone who visits New York should have to go to Istanbul, too, for context — to see a place with the wisdom and melancholy that comes from having once been the most important city in the world. At one point in Pretend It’s a City, Lebowitz laughs at Michael Bloomberg for his delusions of immortality, in declaring a certain pet project to be “permanent” now that it’s laid in concrete. In this respect, we are all Michael Bloomberg.

I don’t, generally, go in for generation war politics — I have never used the phrase “okay, boomer,” and think it’s a poor, poor substitute for actual class politics. But if there’s an inevitable, envious anemoia that Scorcese and Lebowitz’s new project provokes, it’s related to a different sort of demographically-inflected pressure: the Great Content Deflation. As you watch Lebowitz in her tailored clothing, telling stories about her famous friends, it seems scarcely possible to believe that her career and reputation were built the better part of four decades ago, primarily on the strength of two pretty good, pretty funny books of compiled articles and essays and, since then, public speaking engagements. As much as any well-timed real estate purchase (Lebowitz bemoans several missed opportunities), this seems just as staggering a bit of mind-bending Olden Days economic gravity defiance. In the contemporary content-farming era, there are hundreds, if not thousands of young and youngish Fran Lebowitzes not only in New York, but in every city across the continent (not to say the world), churning out their own droll, ascerbic, irascible, insightful, idiosyncratic prose for an insatiable internet that swallows up every piece of creativity like Kleenex in a campfire. “What else ya got?” Ricky Gervais asks as David Brent imitating the general public, and it’s the question that might as well be stamped at the end of every page that manages, by whatever miracle of human output, to get filled. Nobody’s getting to be the subject of two Scorcese documentaries based on a pair of books of funny essays coming out of this generation, I’ll tell you that much. New York? We can’t make it there — or anywhere.