montage #30: Let's talk about New York Movies
Most people don’t live in New York City. I think it’s fun to be reminded of this every now and then because for the terminally online, it can oftentimes feel like everyone lives in New York City but you. And what are you doing not living in New York City? Don’t you like seeing movies three months before everyone else? Don’t you want to tell everyone when the subway floods and/or suddenly stop running? I assume you’re not opposed to seeing Matthew Broderick at a coffee shop? Living on the west coast for the past seven years has been especially interesting in this regard because I’m about as far away as you can be from New York City without needing to get on an airplane, yet when something mildly major happens there I still have the immediate thought of “Not my New York City! What are we going to do!” Like I’m in the we. Like most of us are. We are not.
Before my trip to New York earlier this month, I had only been there in any serious way once before: in January 2017 (a less than stellar time) to see Hamilton (remember Hamilton?). Because I grew up on the east coast, I guarantee you I took part in a family trip to New York at some point in my childhood, but how could that possibly count. What could I have done on that trip — go to Times Square for some reason? (Probably yes.) But there’s something insistent about the way we’ve positioned New York as the cultural nucleus of our recent, current, and ongoing experiences. There’s a vague annoyance to just how “New York!!!” everyone who lives and constantly talks about New York is, but there’s also a louder curiosity, a tinge of a wish to be there and be in the mix. The city is romantic, but it’s also deeply obnoxious how romantic everyone is about the city. But they’re also right to be romantic about it. And so on. So you see. The imperfect ideal of endless possibility.
I sometimes wonder what it must be like to grow up in New York City — how comfortable it must feel to see your hometown depicted across all media everywhere you look, or how strange. For most of us, a movie or a show or a book or a song about New York is usually about the idea of New York more than anything else. How could it not be? Without concrete landmarks to help guide our way, all we’re left to associate with the text is our own imagined idea of the city, an idea that becomes more and more elevated every time we confront a new text that presents it to us. New York, for the uninitiated (again: most people), is only ever signified, never signifier — only ever a conceptualized dream, like Hobbiton or the surface of the moon. This is both unavoidable and unfair. When I taught middle school in Virginia, everyone longed to move to California; as soon as I started teaching high school in California, I found out my students yearned for college in New York. (Meanwhile in a month I’m moving from California to New York, begging the question: why not both?) You might say that this just shows we always want to be wherever we’re not — yes. But no one secretly wants anything more than people secretly want the idea of New York.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been mentally prepping for my move back east by watching New York Movies. These are, famously, movies in which New York City is kind of a main character if you really think about it. Some people really only make New York Movies (Spike Lee, Noah Baumbach), while others dip their toe in when the theme suits the story (Nora Ephron) — I do kind of firmly believe, though, that every American director has at least one New York Movie in them. The Coens made Llewyn Davis. Spielberg made War of the Worlds. Kubrick Eyes Wide Shut. Nicole Holofcener started with a New York classic (Walking and Talking) and only just returned to the setting last year (You Hurt My Feelings). Beau is Afraid is Ari Aster’s New York Movie even though it was shot in Montreal and doesn’t really take place anywhere specific. Etc. The best New York Movies, of course, are the ones that are imbued with a loving understanding of the city’s geography and specific personality — the movies that capture not a general idea of the place, but a representation of that idea that feels idiosyncratic. Your Die Hard with a Vengeances and Raimi Spider-Mans and Taking of Pelham One Two Threes. A depiction of New York not as Place Where News is Spread but as Place Where People Go About Their Lives Same as Anywhere Else. Here are eight (actually nine) of my favorite New York Movies, from someone who has never lived there — my hope is to revisit this post in a couple years with New York state residency and a totally confident MTA mental map under my belt and be like “Ha! Who made this list, a Californian??”
Men in Black (1997)
The original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies were my first introduction to “New York City,” so that means for a few years I thought it was a place where everyone ate thin pizza on dark, wet streets in between putting pantyhose over their heads and robbing electronics stores. It wasn’t until I became obsessed with Men in Black — a VHS tape I played and rewound and played so many times the opening titles started getting wiggly — that I really learned what New York City is all about: inept police officers and grumpy people on their way to work who aren’t phased by anything anymore. The climax of Men in Black at those big Worlds Fair globes? Couldn’t tell you if that’s a real place or even what those are there for, but to me that’s the Big Apple, baby!
Girlfriends (1978) / Frances Ha (2012)
Combining them because one is a spiritual (and at times literal) remake of the other, and because both depict what I imagine being confused in your twenties in an unforgiving city feels like. I love the way both of these movies allow New York to swallow up their central characters and spit them out while still assuring us that there’s no other place these characters would rather be (though Frances tries). Even as someone with no personal history with the city, it’s obvious that New York Movies of the ‘70s and early ‘80s are special artifacts of a place that no longer exists (no opinion on whether this is for the better or for the worse), and even when Girlfriends is taking place indoors, the apartments feel dense and hollow, decaying and temporary. I would argue that this is how it feels to be lost in your twenties, so! Great work everybody.
Rat (1998)
Mark Lewis is known for making documentaries about animals which, much like the films of Errol Morris (who clearly inspired this movie [compliment]), are only sort of actually about the subject in question. Rat is not only his masterpiece, imo, but one of the great depictions of New York on screen. It’s a stylized investigation into the city’s infamous rat infestation, driven by a truly delirious combination of talking heads, non-professional reenactments, and hilariously immersive POV shots of rats hanging out in damp sewers, running across busy streets, and fucking up people’s crawl spaces. Everyone Lewis talks to has got personality for days, and strong opinions about how rats have ruined their life. Sounds like the kind of conversation I’ll be having pretty often in the city!
Just Another Girl on the IRT (1992)
One of the most important indies ever made, and woefully underseen, Just Another Girl is one of these movies that looks like it was made on the streets of New York without much in the way of discretion or permission. Director Leslie Harris has such clear-eyed experience with the city — and such complicated feelings for it — that come through in every shot, and in Ariyan Johnson’s depiction of her Brooklynite high schooler main character, Chantel. It’s a really funny movie that’s full of style, which is a fact that I think gets lost because of its famously melodramatic [compliment] finale, and there’s something about that tonal whiplash that suits its setting perfectly. One of those movies that couldn’t be set anywhere else and still make the same sort of sense.
Paris is Burning (1990)
There are much more qualified and knowledgeable people out there who have written and will continue to write about the totemic Paris is Burning, but even to a total outsider (to the scene, to the city, to the history) it’s a movie that vibrates through all 80 minutes with the undeniable energy of a specific people, a specific place, and a specific, essential time. Most great New York Movies center characters just as much as they center New York — since our idea of New York is so bound up in our idea of “New Yorkers” — and docs that can capture that braiding of people and environment make magic.
Moonstruck (1987)
It’s not the only movie where working class New Yorkers go to the opera at the Met and experience total emotional catharsis, but it’s the best one. Cher and Nicolas Cage both feel distinctly to me like LA movie stars playing a game called “New York” in their backyard [compliment!], but god does the supporting cast just sing verisimilitude. Moonstruck is a movie that yearns to be free of New York more than one that celebrates it, but you need one of those in the mix every now and then!
American Utopia (2020)
David Byrne’s Broadway show, in collaboration with Maira Kalman, directed for the screen by Spike Lee. It ends with Byrne and his cast bicycling through the city in heavy winter coats. I don’t know what else you could want from a New York Movie…
After Hours (1985)
Something I love about After Hours is that it’s got this reputation as one of the great New York Movies despite so much of it so clearly having been filmed on sound stages. That’s just how well Marty knows these streets! It’s a famously claustrophobic film, one that presents 1980s Soho as the ninth circle of Hell, but above all else what I love about its New Yorkiness is the way it (again) rotates the audience through a whole menagerie of unpredictable and fascinating characters. There are chill art freaks, exhausted service workers, uptight yuppies, wackadoo but well-meaning insomniacs — you name it! For non-New Yorkers (the only perspective I can really speak to), this is what New York at its core really is: a stressful place occupied by a limitless well of the most interesting people you’ve ever met. When Griffin Dunne can’t get on the train to go home because they raised the fare overnight I was like “They can just do that??” New York, baby!
This is an obviously incomplete list (lol), so — what are some of YOUR favorite New York Movies?? (Honestly maybe the most perfect ones are the Raimi Spider-Mans, but I already mentioned that.)
Movies I watched this week: Jaws (a high school Film Studies staple) | Rollerball (baffling) | Sin Eater: The Crimes of Anthony Pellicano (classic flat NYT documentary style, but interesting) | King Kong (1933 original…a banger) | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (one of the most massively influential film scores on my life, personally) | Challengers (the year’s first true masterpiece. Feel like I will definitely be writing about this later…it’s so good…)
A note about Montage: Due to obviously moving across the country in the next 4-5 weeks, I can’t promise that every issue of this newsletter will be complete, arrive on time, or arrive at all. I would be sorry about that, but…idk…it’s free! So. I’ll do my best!
Leslye Headland’s Sleeping with Other People