Case Study #14: The Case of the Two-Faced Cinematic City We Live in Wherever We Are

 1

It’s strange to me sometimes to consider that half the week people live with me who have been to New York City, while I myself never have, yet I feel in some ways I still know it better than them. A couple years ago, my kids’ mom took them there to go to museums and sight-seeing, and of course their in-person experience of the world’s most famous city beats my complete lack of that hands down. My 40 years of absorbing cultural offerings set there, though, makes me feel that in some ways it’s more alive in my imagination than in my kids’ few real memories. Through books, magazine articles, song lyrics, television shows, and movies, I’ve gotten to know it so well, I feel I could sketch it out convincingly through words or art, and even if the correct order of streets or placement of boroughs wasn’t there, its essential spirit would still shine through in my efforts to depict it.

One of the key characteristics of New York City is its beautiful synthesis of inherent contradictions, and nowhere is that more apparent than on the big, silver screen (or little, as it must be these days), where this can lodge in our minds at a glance, to be chewed over and folded into our assessment of the next film we take in set in that place that itself contains multitudes, to use the phrase coined by NYC’s most famous poet, Walt Whitman. A film I saw recently drove home one such dichotomy that in a sense represents a contradiction our whole country struggles with. I’ll save that for last, because in fact it turned out that film wasn’t even set in New York City. Yet that doesn’t matter, because the depictions of certain urban settings – both interior and exterior – by default swing our thoughts back around to the cinematic lodestone we associate with them the most. When these layer up enough, it’s like an anchor line can be seen sunk taut from the top to bottom depths of the ocean of American culture.

The specific dichotomy I’m talking about here today actually concerns exactly that, the polarized but sometimes warily synthesized depictions of the high and low stations and behavior out there, in that metropolis across the continent from me. I’m talking about the dichotomy between Genteel New York City and Mean Streets New York City, that Janus god of Americana we all pray to with our enduring entertainment choices.

Many films set in The Big Apple don’t fit into either of those two categories, but on the other hand, there are few other categories as predominant as these over the course of filmed fiction’s short century and a quarter history. This could derive from the fact that the foundation of cinema is simply existing plays that were enacted in front of cameras, and many of the most popular plays at the time the Lumière brothers popularized motion pictures were what we now call drawing-room comedies. That label is deceptive though, because this genre also included a constant vein of melodrama, as well as a focus on the aloof upper class and the clean, nearly-spartan settings their interactions were set against, both of which are elements I’ll soon focus on, when it comes to more modern movies. As Benedict Nightingale writes in his 1985 New York Times article “Whatever Happened to Drawing-Room Comedy”:

The ingredients obviously vary from play to play, but the general formula remains much the same. If the setting isn’t a drawing-room in an elegant townhouse, it’s one in a country mansion, complete with French windows leading to the inevitable tennis courts. Apart from the numerous servants, the characters take their social importance as blithely for granted as their private incomes, and are probably right to do so, since they’re quite likely to have titles… Drawing-room comedy thrives in class-consciousness and a class system, the more rigid and rarified the better.[1]

Nightingale points out that drawing-room comedy “never took hold in egalitarian America to the extent it did on the more stratified side of the ocean.”[2] However, that’s a bit of a disingenuous assertion, since he also cites as a quintessential example of this genre the American dramatist Philip Barry’s play The Philadelphia Story – which, of course, later became the popular 1959 film of the same name starring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and Jimmy Stewart. That was the tip of the iceberg of such fare that did well at the box office for decades, including 1934’s It Happened One Night, 1935’s Top Hat, 1936’s My Man Godfrey, 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, 1942’s Holiday Inn, 1954’s Sabrina, 1956’s High Society, all six The Thin Man films that came out in the 30s and 40s, and many more. Unsurprisingly, the other half of the dichotomy I’m talking about here had its antecedent running parallel to these films throughout that same era: film noir.

The traditional gangster genre began to hit the silver screen in the 30s and 40s, but at some point the stylistic influence of German Expressionism and tropes of popular pulp fiction novels, as well as the jaded malaise that began to spread across the land after the shock of the Great Depression wore off, all combined together to create a unique, new genre, which was actually named film noir by the Italian-born French film critic Nino Frank in 1946.[3] In stark contrast to the affluence and self-possession on display in drawing-room comedies and melodramas, film noirs featured characters spiraling downward, due to either financial binds with criminal entanglements seemingly the only solutions, or else obsessions with troublesome women (1944’s Double Indemnity), objects or activities (1941’s The Maltese Falcon), or sometimes both at once (1950’s Gun Crazy). This wide net caught up certain key, common themes, as Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward put it in their introduction to Film Noir: An Encyclopedia Reference to the American Style, regarding the hundreds of films in this genre that came out during the period from just before World War II to just after the start of the Korean War:

As the individual entries in this study reveal, those motion pictures vary considerably in many respects from plot to production value; but they all reflect a common ethos: they consistently evoke the dark side of the American persona. The central figures in these films, caught in their double binds, filled with existential bitterness, drowning outside the mainstream, are America’s stylized vision of itself, a true cultural reflection of the mental dysfunction of a nation in uncertain transition.[4]

One thing not mentioned in that encyclopedia anywhere is the fact that the majority of film noir scenes take place outdoors, on the streets, sidewalks, and waterfronts of America’s most built-up and built-out, confusing, alienating, and dirty metropolises. (And train stations: I think of the long subway tracks fistfight tracking shot Samuel Fuller treats us to in 1953’s Pickup on South Street). Whether they are set in San Francisco, Chicago, or Los Angeles, these are proto-Mean Streets of New York City films. In contrast, the proto-Genteel New York City films flaunted the opposite: tight interiority, strict adherence to the trajectory of expected social mores, clarity, satisfying connections between people, and above all clean people and clean rooms in which they discussed their acceptable, palatable worries.

Decades passed and now, in the films within my own lifetime, it is the hyperbolic extremes of those two sets of characteristics that dominate the screen, largely at a remove from the gist of their antecedents.

It is a progression by synecdoche, and it leads us toward a whole new set of meanings about America.

2

First off, in considering the above characteristics for the Genteel New York City category, I have to begin with a very on-the-nose film: 1978’s Interiors by Woody Allen. Its title refers to Geraldine Page’s Eve character’s profession of interior designer, as well as serving as a metaphor for the largely internalized problems she and her family have, as they try to understand and, with only limited success, connect with one another. And already we can see how the spirit of the old drawing-room comedies and melodramas has been blasted apart by the decades since its heyday, leaving behind some of its superficial trappings, like shrapnel for us to remove from traumatized characters and handle with care.

Certainly, Allen had already shown people interacting in New York City rooms for quite a while already by that point, including of course in his most famous film, the previous year’s Annie Hall. That film, though, included a lightness of tone that suppressed the potential for the walls and other architecture to reinforce the haughty, affluent vibe I’m talking about here. With its soaring George Gershwin score, 1979’s Manhattan is also almost too uplifting to count, however – thanks largely to his filming in black and white for the first time – the interiors for this films scenes almost seem as stark and monolithic as its broad exterior shots of the city. A couple times in the 80s, Allen would dip back into his original humorous mode, but more and more he tacked hard in a more somber, fraught domestic affairs direction, with the wind of Ingmar Bergman at his back. This builds from 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters, to 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, to 1992’s Husbands and Wives. I’ll have more to say about that last one soon here, but first lets skip across a trail of other filmmakers’ examples of this genre of middle- to upper-middleclass people handling their problems with dignity in New York City against interior backdrops that are both swank but still somehow modestly nondescript.

That’s a key nuance to what I’m talking about: discretion in both how the characters comport themselves in these rooms and how quietly the set design elements there do their job. This is why films about gaudy, flashy new money don’t count. So all versions of The Great Gatsby are out, 1987’s Wall Street and its 2010 sequel are out, 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street is out, and so are any films about this class of Americans that actually mostly take place in Europe, where the supporting players are supercilious and the houses more grandiose, with more ostentatious decorations. Thus, while on the page, the books of Henry James and Edith Warton are a kind of Big Bang to the universe I’m delineating here, on the screen this isn’t always the case. 1996’s The Portrait of a Lady is out, 1997’s The Wings of the Dove is out, and so is 1993’s Ethan Frome, because, well, that one takes place in a small farming town. The Age of Innocence though – also from 1993 – that film has what I’m talking about in spades: the hushed drama playing out inside rooms that could be life-sized dioramas of a child’s idea of a childfree adult world.

And that’s a key element here, the Emperor’s New Clothes so to speak: the complete lack of joy on display in these films. Sure, some of the characters seem to get a kind of cerebral joy out of the oblique approach everyone employs when interacting, but that’s as dry as the backdrops they perform these social do-si-dos in front of. I think of the WASP teens having an Eric Rohmer-like lost weekend in 1990’s Metropolitan, only without the surrounding beauty that often gets taken for granted in that French master’s films. I think of the characters a little older than those in All the Vermeers in New York – which came out the same year – moving after each other through white-walled rooms in the city with all the verve of geometric pieces being shifted around in a puzzle box. (And that makes me think of the deliberate affected, at-a-remove tone of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy of novels: 1985’s City of Glass, and 1986’s Ghosts and The Locked Room). In recent years, this trend has come to a head with the films of Noah Baumbach, Woody Allen’s successor when it comes to combining neuroses, humor, and pathos among the middle- to upper-middleclass New York City intelligentsia. His characters do at times express appreciation for each other at times, and for the fleeting rewards the world offers, but never in an exuberant, joyous manner. (With the exception being the title character in 2012’s Frances Ha, but in my opinion that’s because his collaborations with Greta Gerwig tug his solo filmmaking inclinations in a lighter direction). I think of both the marriage townhouse and the single dad’s apartment in 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, the father and stepmother’s townhouse in 2017’s The Meyerwitz Stories (the decor and sale of which actually becomes a significant subplot in the film), or the idyllic New York City apartment where the family of three lives in the first third of 2019’s Marriage Story. Adam Driver’s character in that last one is a successful playwright, and that foregrounds the way Baumbach himself excels at returning us to a fraught, modern version of the drawing-room comedy/drama that used to dominate the stage a century or so ago.

Interestingly, I can think of at least two other films in this genre that feature characters who perform on a stage: 2010’s Black Swan (with Natalie Portman’s protagonist a ballet dancer) and 2011’s Margaret (with Anna Panquin’s mother, played by J. Smith-Cameron, a stage actress). The Manhattan apartments occupied by the characters in both films are very similar, with their shadows and clutter accentuating the fact that these families aren’t as well off as those in some of the other films I’ve discussed here, but also a hermetic seal quiet aspect that nonetheless speaks of the level of wealth and security required to attain a dwelling high above the noise and chaos of New York City’s mean streets.

What can come up from those mean streets to disrupt the safe, staid rooms high above them will be the subject of this next transitional section of this essay.

3

People in fancy clothes attending a stage performance also features in my favorite example of this Genteel New York City genre: 2004’s Birth. As Nicole Kidman’s Anna attends the symphony with her fiancé Joseph, played by Danny Huston, the camera only shows us her seated in the audience while the music begins, to show a weather system of emotion passing across her face for half a dozen minutes, until she’s wiping away tears. What has upset her is something that has literally come up to the pristine apartment she shares with her mother from the streets below: a mysterious 10 year-old boy who appears – after actually getting his hands dirty digging something up out of the ground in a dark park nearby – and announces to the gathered adults that he is Anna’s dead husband Sean. Obviously, this also upsets Joseph, who in a shocking later scene attacks the boy. What he says during that is very revealing as far as what I’m examining here.

As the boy sits with a couple dozen adults in Anna’s family’s drawing room watching a small group of chamber musicians begin to play, he deliberately kicks the back of Joseph’s chair. The man turns and tells him, “I want you to stop that,” then turns forward. The boy begins kicking the chair again and abruptly Joseph gets up and lunges backward, grabbing Sean and dragging him into the center of the room, until men run over pull him away from the child. Joseph, seeming to take possession of himself, says, “He has no clue how to make something happen. He’s living in a land where he’s pretending to be something, instead of doing the job. And that’s the real problem. I’m the one who should be respected, but obviously not!” Then Joseph pushes the grand piano to block Sean into the adjacent library, crawls across the top of it and grabs him and carries him into a third connected room, where he lays the child across a desk and begins spanking him, until the adults catch up with him and pull the apart again. In the immediate context of the film, Huston’s character clearly seem like the villain. (Especially because, to my ears, he echoes the part in 1993’s Philadelphia where Jason Robard’s Charles Wheeler exclaims about Tom Hank’s Andrew Beckett: “Andy brought AIDS into our offices, into our bathroom, brought AIDS into our annual goddamn family picnic.”) In the context of this essay, though, his character is breaking the fourth wall for our benefit in a sense, frantically calling out not just a transgressor in their midst there, but also in fact a tear in the fabric between the two genres I’m talking about here.

This scene between the adult and the 10 year-old child in Birth echoes a shocking scene in Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, where Sydney Pollack’s Jack grows irritated and embarrassed with the philistine comments of his young girlfriend Sam, played by Lysette Anthony, at a friend’s party, and he grabs her and pulls her kicking and screaming out to their car – literally from the cloistered interior of Genteel New York out to the chaotic Mean Streets of New York. He is the one who is mean in this case, screaming, “Get in the car, you fucking infant!” Oddly, Pollack, who was normally a director, took another acting job, in 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, in which he berated a character in a very similar way, Tom Cruises’s childlike protagonist Dr. Bill Harford. (Note that, while the film is famous for his journey through New York at night that includes spending time with a call girl and with the denizens of a cult-like orgy, his character barely seem seems sexual, despite making out a little with the former). Stanley Kubrick’s final film is nearly bookended with scenes in the mansion of Victor Ziegler, Pollack’s mentor character. In the beginning, at a party, Bill helps a young woman whom Victor had been having sex with recover from a drug overdose. At the end, Bill returns to get advice from Victor on all he’s experienced, and after the older man hears out the pacing younger one’s desperate concerns, he exclaims, “Ok Bill, let’s, let’s, let’s cut the bullshit. You’ve been WAY out of your depth for the last 24 hours.” In a sense, this is the reverse of the scenes discussed above: He is trying to pull back in his friend from the Mean Streets of New York that have filled his head with distasteful temptations and ethical confusion, to ground him back within the clear parameters the classy billiard room they’re conversing in represents.

This brings to mind what Eric Rohmer wrote in 1955 in Cahiers du Cinéma, at a time when much of what made it over to France from Hollywood were the drawing room comedies/dramas I described earlier, by directors like Howard Hawks and George Cukor. In his essay “Rediscovering America,” Rohmer writes, “If I had to characterize the American style of cinema, I would put forward the two words efficacy and elegance.”[5] Those characteristics also circumscribe both the behavior expected of those in Genteel New York City films and the aesthetic look of the rooms they interact within. Understandably, then, those in these films are more concerned with gatekeeping than those in the counterpart category I’ll look into next. After all, if the Mean Streets of New York genre is best defined by the opposites of the above terms – say, by inexactness and grittiness – then of course we would expect these films and the characters in them to have in common – if nothing else – the theme of being uncontained.

In fact, on the downslope of this transitional hill of films we find James Toback’s 1999 ensemble melodrama Black and White, which, even more so than its overt themes of race and identity, is characterized by its sprawling, fractal-like vibe, with its upper class teens seeming to literally spill out of the muted interiors of their families’ classy brownstones, down the front steps and into the mean streets of New York City, spreading out into nearly every borough by the film’s finale. (A facile parallel could be made to the 1995 film Kids, except that the apartments the earlier film’s characters live in are clearly much further down the economic spectrum, even in a sense, in terms of their barely contained disorder, interior reflections of the chaos the kids experience – and perpetrate – outside). Descending from a place of well-off, controlled living to an uncontained state of mind out in New York City’s open, public spaces is often presented on film as a source for personal epiphanies and catharsis, as in 1991’s The Fisher King, in which a despondent radio DJ gives up his successful career and all its trappings to romp around Central Park with a delusional homeless man. We wouldn’t be all the way at the bottom of the downslope, though, if we weren’t talking about protagonists who don’t turn out okay in the end, as Jeff Bridges’s Jack Lucas does in that film. I’m thinking now of 2019’s Uncut Gems, which shows us Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner character sliding down further and further from the cloistered, dignified rooms of his family world into the ultimate stop on an uncontained life, with his whole journey actually beginning with a bet on top of a bet called out to a bookie while the two are hustling down a busy New York City sidewalk. Twice in this brilliant film, Sandler is literally shown in vulnerable positions outside buildings that themselves are known as secure places: first, when he steps away from his daughter’s evening school performance and gets ambushed in the parking lot by the thugs he owes money to, who strip him and lock him in the trunk of a car; and then later when they come into his high up jewelry shop, demanding what they’re owed, and he runs into a back room and leans precariously out an open window to toss a bag of cash to his girlfriend who’s reaching over from another adjacent one, in a desperate attempt to spin the inevitable off his scent like a matador flinging his red cape away or a stage clown putting on a nonchalant face while twirling his arm behind his back and flicking his fingers to try and get rid of a stuck piece of tape.

Like that last sentence, the Mean Streets of New York genre is all about everything mixed together and overstuffed. It isn’t just about a gritty and dangerous milieu; it’s also bravado and bluster and scheming and innovative on-the-spot thinking, digressions and a bullet-like trajectory paradoxically coexisting, connections that can be made in any direction but with prickly consequences, like a porcupine rolling up Fifth Avenue, it’s so much communication that incoherence becomes an aspect of set design unto itself, it’s as much the main characters interacting with strangers as with the Genteel New York genre it is not. If the Genteel New York Genre is the high math of narrower and narrower finite possibilities, then the Mean Streets of New York genre is the lowly math of the infinite, that very American Zen koan.

4

In the beginning of 1996’s Flirting with Disaster, in a voiceover Ben Stiller’s Mel Coplin relays to Téa Leoni’s Tina Kalb his worries about finding out the truth about his birth parents, while a montage of corresponding possibilities walk toward us along a New York City sidewalk: “And there’s my father, right? I look at guys on the street every day, regular guys on the street. Depending on my mood, I imagine that any one of them can be my father. This guy… How bout this guy? [the montage comes to a shirtless, hairy old guy digging through a garbage can, who turns and raises two middle fingers to passersby] Hi, Dad!” That scene perfectly encapsulates that lowly math of the infinite, with its x and y axes of homogenous populism and unrestrained emotional venting charting the Mean Streets of New York algorithm, that pattern whose only consistency is confrontational unpredictability.

I think of Billy Eichner’s sporadic 21st Century reality show Billy on the Street, in which he and his celebrity guests accost people walking along New York City sidewalks to alternately quiz and berate them in a dizzying, surreal style that feels immediately familiar to anyone who has absorbed depictions of that city and its denizens for decades – even if, like me, they have never actually been there in person. The Netflix show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt had not one but two characters like this: the naïve protagonist’s roommate Titus Andromedon and their landlord Lillian Kaushtupper, each known for their boisterous sidewalk complaints and defiant self-assertive moments. There are two real life mascots of this archetype, though: Fran Lebowitz (especially as displayed in her and Martin Scorsese’s 2021 Netflix reality series Pretend It’s a City), and Larry David (who’s co-creation Seinfeld made mainstream such kvetching and whose current show Curb Your Enthusiasm, while mostly set in Los Angeles, has included a whole season – 2011’s Season 8 – set in New York City, which includes many scenes of Larry getting into tiffs with people on sidewalks and parks and other public spaces). Lebowitz and David actually have Scorsese in common, because in two episodes of Season 3 of Curb, the director employs the comedian to play a small role in a made-up mobster film. But that makes complete sense, because, of course, Scorsese’s work is so much at the center of the Mean Streets of New York genre that I’ve named it after one of his films.

That third feature film of his, released in 1973, wasn’t even going to be named Mean Streets originally. The working script was called The Season of the Witch. After rewriting it, upon the encouragement of John Cassevetes – when Scorsese lamented he’d rather pursue his own vision, rather than make another exploitation film for B-movie producer Roger Corman – he gave it a new name, inspired by this line from the Raymond Chandler essay “The Simple Art of Murder”: “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” In the film itself, though, the soon-to-be-famous director immediately indicates that he’ll be saddling that phrase with a heavier weight than the pulp detective story master did. In the opening narration of Mean Streets, Scorsese himself barks out lines that not only foreshadow much of the rest of his own oeuvre to come, but also the broader genre I’m talking about here: “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.”[6] Barring The Age of Innocence, most of the homes depicted in Scorsese’s films don’t have Genteel New York interiors. Thus, it’s safe to assume the middle sentences in that voiceover aren’t laid side-to-side as a dichotomy, but rather as a Kids-type scenario where the vibe of the inside and the outside correspond.

After all, the most famous line in a Martin Scorsese film happens inside an apartment with a character addressing himself in the mirror as if he’s addressing a stranger outside in the public realm. When Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle, in 1976’s Taxi Driver, interrogates his reflection with “You talkin’ to me?!” he could be Larry David or Billy Eichner or Fran Lebowitz confronting someone on the sidewalk, with that uniquely New York blend of both self-referential humor and menacing seriousness.

Certainly, a large part of what we associate with the Mean Streets of New York genre is more the latter than the former – or a mix of both – especially when it comes to the tv shows and films created by those who took inspiration from Scorsese’s early work. I’m thinking of Spike Lee’s films, particularly those with a lot of scenes out in the streets, like 1989’s Do The Right Thing and 1995’s Clockers; Abel Ferrara’s films, particularly 1992’s abrasive masterpiece Bad Lieutenant; James Gray’s trilogy of New York crime films (1994’s Little Odessa, 2000’s The Yards, and 2007’s We Own the Night); the Safdie brothers films, particularly 2017’s breakthrough lowlife thriller Good Time; Matthew Harrison’s films, particularly 1994’s Rhythm Thief about a concert bootlegger beset by an angry band and many other demanding characters (and it should be noted Scorsese helped produce his next effort, 1997’s Kicked in the Head); Lodge Kerrigan’s 2004 film Keane about the father of a girl abducted in New York City’s Port Authority Terminal obsessively looking for her there and turning his attention elsewhere with delusional intensity; on up through David Milch’s long-running tv hit NYPD Blue, which revolutionized the gritty take on urban cop shows that became commonplace after that; and the 2019 film The Joker, which with its comparisons to both Taxi Driver and 1982’s The King of Comedy, proved that even the Brooklyn-born director Todd Phillips – hitherto known for the bland West Coast Hangover comedies – had Scorsese’s influence and that of the broader Mean Streets of New York genre waiting to blossom deep within him when he had true cinematic freedom available to him.

I don’t mean to give one director all the credit for this genre, though, because of course many others contributed to its foundation. There were all of Sidney Lumet’s gritty New York City crime films, from 1973’s Serpico on up to his 2007 swan song Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. There’s William Friedkin’s 1971 The French Connection, which set the standard for depictions of detectives mingling with street life types as they chased down their prey. And then I think of Norman Jewison’s 1979 film And Justice for All, in which Al Pacino’s lawyer character Arthur Kirkland must balance defending a guilty judge as well as other innocent clients as all part of a day’s work in the mélange that is part and parcel for the Mean Streets of New York genre. At one point in that film, another judge, Kirkland’s friend played by Jack Warden, flies them out over the river in his personal helicopter until they run out of gas and crash into the dirty water. Somehow they both survive and dive back into their harried New York City lives as if nothing has happened, and that’s the point here: this genre isn’t just about crime and grunginess. It’s also about what it takes to survive not just in America’s quintessential metropolis, but also within the dirty river of late-stage Capitalism overall.

I think of the 1994 Hal Hartley film Amateur, which includes a scene where an accountant – the personification of Capitalism – played by the actor Damian Young, is tortured in a warehouse on the New York City waterfront for information, then after he’s been electrocuted and left for dead, yet somehow manages to lurch away, seeking revenge, a street urchin hiding in the shadows in the abandoned building there – played by ubiquitous 90’s supporting actress Parker Posey – calls out, “You be careful out there, Honey!” I think of the opening credits of 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, which don’t show dancing, as you might expect, but rather the feet and legs of John Travolta’s Tony Manero character strutting down a crowded New York City sidewalk as the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive” plays on the soundtrack. That sentiment was so important, they named the 1983 sequel to that movie after that song.

Staying alive is so precarious in this genre of films that only one of the two main characters in 1969’s Midnight Cowboy – the most bittersweet entry in this category – manages to accomplish it. Before Jon Voigt’s Joe Buck finds himself riding on a bus with a corpse at the end of that film, though, he learns many lesson from Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo mentor, including during that film’s most famous scene, which was partially improvised as the two walked out into traffic and encountered an unexpected taxi[7]:

Look, with these gals that wanna buy, most of them are old and dignified. Social register types, you know what I mean? They can’t be trotting down to Times Square to pick up… guys. They gotta have some kind of a middle man. And that’s where ole Daniel comes in, you know what I mean? [They step into the busy crosswalk and a taxi noses up to Dustin Hoffman and honks] Hey, you fuckin’ shit! [He slaps the hood and the cigarette falls out of his mouth as he yells] I’m Walkin’ here. I’m WALKIN here! [as the taxi rolls past, he continues to yell at the driver] Up yours, you son of a bitch! You don’t talk to me that way. Get outta here! [He gives the middle finger, jerked up with the other arm blocking the forearm twice at the taxi, the driver still honking in the distance; then he returns to his conversation with Voigt’s character, without missing a beat, taking him by the arm] Don’t worry about that. Actually, that ain’t a bad way to pick up insurance, you know.

And just like that we have the best lesson of the Mean Streets of New York genre: how to finesse dangerous distractions with aplomb. It should be no secret at this point that of the two, this is the side of the scale that bears the most weight of the American experience.

As the tagline to one of the posters for Martin Scorsese’s period retooling of Mean Streets, 2002’s Gangs of New York, puts it: “America was born in the streets.” That’s the milieu where we all have to make up for our sins, as Scorsese himself put it at the beginning of Mean Streets. Out on the roads, that’s where we’ve all come to look for America.

5

In 1968, the year before Midnight Cowboy came out, Simon and Garfunkel released their fourth (and second to last) studio album, Bookends, which included the cult national anthem “America.” That song which – like the characters in that John Schlesinger-directed film to come – ends with two characters on a bus on the East Coast, with one awake and contemplative and the other unresponsive, ends with the lines:

“Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They’ve all come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America

And it could be anywhere in our wide country, couldn’t it, not just across the river from the New Jersey Turnpike in New York City, right? We can find America wherever we are, from coast to coast. Even in a place that seems to be New York City, but is not.

After all, much of the film Mean Streets was actually filmed in Los Angles, in southern California.[8]

Just as the film that began this essay for me, 2020’s Pieces of a Woman, seemed at first to be set in New York City, but then revealed itself in the third act to be set in Boston, Massachusetts. But then of course, unsurprisingly, upon closer examination, Pieces of a Woman turned out to have been filmed mostly in Montreal, Canada, and Oslo, Norway,[9] proving that the idea of America itself is globally transferrable. More than that, though, so is the idea of both the Genteel New York City genre and the Mean Streets of New York genre, both of which get an overlapping shout out in this film.

I had long been looking forward to the follow-up to the Hungarian director Kornél Munduczó’s 2014 trained-dog film White Dog, so when I learned he was coming stateside for a big name melodrama, I impatiently tracked the release date for Pieces of a Woman. Immediately, upon beginning it on Netflix in January 2021, I was impressed with the first act, especially since with the actress Molly Parker cast as a midwife, it presented a mirror image of one of my favorite films, 1999’s Wonderland, in which that actress has to pretend to give birth. By the second act of Pieces of a Woman, though, as the male lead Shia LaBeouf’s Sean character is shown to force himself sexually upon his grieving wife, played by Vanessa Kirby, I was thoroughly turned off by this potential awards contender, especially as its fictional story portrayed unfortunate parallels to the life of the actor in question.[10] To my chagrin, however, even despite hockey dialogue and unbelievable plotting, something drew me back into the third act of Pieces of a Woman, and that was the genteel setting of one of the key scenes of the film, a multi-person argument that takes place in the old money townhouse of Elizabeth, the matriarch of the film, played with steely self-possession by veteran actress Ellyn Burstyn. Here was an interior that seemed reassuringly familiar, with its stark walls and enough windows to let in the light of truth, it seemed.

Just the mere trappins of the Genteel New York genre is enough to quash any qualms, because that’s the power of money in our society it turns out, even to a deceptive degree that reaches out and affects us through the small, silver screen.

After a fight with her daughter about the court case they’re bringing against Parker’s midwife character seems to empty her house, Burstyn’s Elizabeth walks back into another room and discovers her son-in-law Sean seated with his back to her in her houseplant atrium. She detours for a moment to write him a check, then goes in there and, after some platitudes are exchanged, this telling dialogue occurs:

Elizabeth: I’m sorry, I… I never liked you. And it’s not because you’re poor.

Sean: No, it’s ‘cause I’m, um – ‘Cause I’m not an intellectual, and I’m not – I don’t use big words. And, uh, ‘cause I’m rough and I’m – Well, here’s a Scrabble word. ‘Cause I’m boorish. Hhooh. Ha.

Elizabeth: What do you want?

Sean: What do I want? I wanta… I probably want to go home. Yeah, that’s what I want the most.

Elizabeth: And why don’t you?

Sean: We don’t all live like this, you know? [He gestures to the house with his hand, then drops it. She unfolds the check and hands it over to him. He laughs.]

Elizabeth: Take it and… don’t come back. [Sean takes it, then after she instructs him to make whatever excuse is necessary to not come back to her daughter, she leaves out the atrium’s French doors and the scene ends with a shot of the back of Sean’s head, as he contemplates the check and chuckles lightly again, several stacks of books becoming prominent though blurry in the middle distance.]

This brings to mind another character named Sean being told to leave a genteel interior and return to whence he came – which we know to be the streets of the city, in LaBeouf’s character’s case as a literal bridge builder – and I think you know who I mean: the 10 year-old child Sean being chased though affluent rooms by Joseph, Nicole Kidman’s Anna character’s fiancé, in the 2004 film Birth.

He has no clue how to make something happen. He’s living in a land where he’s pretending to be something, instead of doing the job. And that’s the real problem. I’m the one who should be respected, but obviously not!

And the moneyed spanks the unmoneyed, and sends him on his way, to fend for himself on the mean streets of America, where we have to take care of each other improvisationally, infinitely, in a mathematically impossible manner. Yet we do, nonetheless, to the disbelief of the rich in their stark and lonely rooms.

[1] Benedict Nightingale, “Whatever Happened to Drawing-Room Comedy?” The New York Times, April 28, 1985, section H, p. 4

[2] ibid

[3] Film Noir: An Encyclopedia Reference to the American Style, Edited by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, New York City, The Overlook Press, 1979, Introduction, p. 1

[4] ibid, p. 6

[5] Cahiers Du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hellier, Eric Rohmer, “Rediscovering America,” p. 89

[6] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/75717/10-mean-facts-about-mean-streets

[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20120817130034/http://xfinity.comcast.net/slideshow/entertainment-unscriptedmoviemoments/7/

[8] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/75717/10-mean-facts-about-mean-streets

[9] https://www.republicworld.com/entertainment-news/hollywood-news/where-is-pieces-of-a-woman-filmed-know-about-shooting-locations-of-this-2020-film.html

[10] https://www.bustle.com/entertainment/shia-labeouf-pieces-of-a-woman-performance-echoes-fka-twigs-allegations