The wit of a maverick woman comedian may seem an unlikely subject for film director Martin Scorsese. The educated Association Test would rather come up with “the Mafia,” “urban violence,” “macho macho miserables,” than a very literate woman comic.
But that’s where Fran Lebowitz comes in. Both in her abandoned writing career and in her current standup/sitdown comedy performances she strikes a fighter’s pose to battle against the absurdities and dangers of contemporary city life. Especially NYC.
For there is violence in civilized behaviour as well as in Scorses’s mean streets, alleys and boxing rings. Indeed that is what drew him to film Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence — the privileged woman’s novel that he and Lebowitz discuss briefly in Episode 2. While Lebowitz is front, center and the dominant presence of the film, the auteur is Scorsese. In his selection of the material and — especially — his arrangement of it, this is as much a Scorsese film as Taxi Driver is. It's just that Fran Lebowitz is no Travis Bickle.
Episode 1
“Pretend it’s a city,” Lebowitz declares and the phrase sticks as the series title.
We know NYC is a city so what’s there to ‘pretend’? Well, it’s supposed to be a city but is it? Beyond the streets and population figures, is it really a city? Or is it an arena for thoughtless, uncivilized, dangerous, insensitive mis-conduct. The urban behaviour Lebowitz satirizes here points to the latter.
“Speaking of people in the street,” does it bother you that…” an audience member starts to ask. “Yes,” snaps Fran. People in the street do bother her. They are unthinking, self-absorbed, confident in their own invulnerability and completely careless about others. A city should be a community, not a collision of insensitive atoms. Absent that, we can only pretend it’s a city. Only once we acknowledge our mutual responsibilities will we have the community the true city connotes.
Scorsese’s setting for the comedian’s riffs is telling. From the street symphonic beginning to the big bluesy end — and in between — the music romanticizes The Big Apple. This is the mythic New York of popular lore. The satirist’s reality will play against that.Scorsese, remember, also directed that musical drama New York, New York.
Fran’s routines, whether onstage or in interview, are intercut with two series of shots of her moving through the streets. In one: with Scorsese and the photographer unseen, she strides alone — a solid dark-cloaked figure cutting through the heedless crowds. The other is a dramatic contrast: she towers over a miniature model of the sprawling metropolis. It’s a brilliant visual representation of her perception — detached from the street scene, towering over it, rendering physical the moral detachment and judging the artist will bring to bear.
“Do you tend to look down on people?” Scorsese asks. Of course she does, when she finds them failing in humanity. When they disagree with her. She is enraged that she has no power to change them. “The only person in the city looking where she’s going is me.” A young man steering his bicycle with his elbows while texting on his phone and eating a pizza almost hits her in a crosswalk. She is continually besieged by tourists asking direction, obstructing her movement, engrossed in their cellphones, maddeningly selfish. Someone smashed her windshield to steal an apple and a 50-cent pack of cigarettes — and she accepts blame for the temptation. Responsibility is what’s pretended to in this city.
Lebowitz exults in being out of step. Hence her advice to Robert Stigwood: “A musical about Eva Peron? Don’t do it!” He did it — and earned “a million a minute.” Meanwhile, buildings like the Mercer Center simply collapse into dust by their neglect.
The city remains a challenge. Nothing is permanent there, not even the $40-million concrete couches the mayor ordered for Times Square. Nor all the benches, planters, trinkets, that make the city “look like my grandmother’s apartment.” This heavy whimsey is another way New York City fails itself. So, too, it’s expensiveness: “No-one can afford to live in New York. Yet 80 million do? How? We don’t know." But move there anyway. “You will do enough things to live here.” And even better: “You’ll have contempt for the people who don’t have the guts to do it.”
Episode 2
Here’s another way Scorsese finds Lebowitz’s wit sympatico. Her moral satire is firmly in the tradition of Jewish comedy. And in America — Italian, Jewish, what’s the difference? Both are minority culture communities, tightly bound within but firmly Outside the society’s mainstream, indeed frozen in malicious stereotype. Jewish comedy derives from the feeling of being a fringe observer, excluded, indeed always endangered, but with the consequent privilege of being able to observe, discriminate and judge. That’s the satirist’s mission.
Lebowitz works in the tradition of Mel Brooks, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, indeed drawing back to the noble profession of the Old Testament prophets, licensed to rail against the follies of their day. The Jewish spirit pervades her work here, less in specific jokes than in the marginalized wit’s moral indignation.
There’s a rare Jewish joke in the second episode. Lebowitz gave up her passion for making art because “It was too pleasurable.” Life is not supposed to be pleasurable. That’s why Jews are forbidden bacon.
This self-denial is central to Jewish comedy. First, it’s rooted in the Jewish history of persecution and danger, a life constantly at risk. Pleasures and confidence are to be reined in — dismissed with a spit — lest they bestir The Evil Eye. So, too, as a girl Fran was advised not to be funny around boys. Despite such restraint in her nurture, though, the compulsion of wit was sufficiently entrenched in her nature that it remains her — yes, career, but mainly her — way to live.
The second episode focuses on the comedian’s practice of her Art. The opening joke pivots from the first episode’s focus on civility into considering the nature of art. The bigoted baker refuses to make a wedding cake for a gay couple because it would violate his “art.” No, says Lebowitz, that’s not art; it’s “a snack.” She proceeds to consider the nature of art.
So, too, the opening reverses the title: “It’s a city” then “Pretend.” Because we’re in a city, a community, we have to pretend, i.e., play, fictionalize, make art. Pretending is what the artist does, in whatever art. Of course, the primary pretence is that the work is just a fabrication, unreal, an escape from reality. But as the purveyors of fictions and constructions in the other arts know, it’s rather the realest real.
Two scenes demonstrate this explicitly. In one Lebowitz rejects Spike Lee’s proposal that basketball star Michael Jordan ranks with Picasso as an artist. He may be in the pantheon as an athlete, she admits, but because his work is ephemeral, i.e., it cannot be accessed or repeated, he is equivalent to a dancer. Unlike music or theatre, in a game once we know the ending the grip is lost.
In the second she notes that a Picasso painting is introduced to an auction house’s silence, but a hearty round of applause greets its sale for $160 million. The commodity outweighs the art. Instead of “Isn’t he good at painting?” we get “Aren’t you good at buying.”
As New York is enriched by its art and its liberty, it provides a refuge from provincialism: “What’s not here? Wherever you’re from.” A density of angry homosexuals is one sign of the city’s health.
Toni Morrison says she writes so as not to be “stuck with life.” Lebowitz defines her profession as a writer as “making distinctions,” judging, i.e., exerting a social conscience. In the series of artists she shows here — Leonard Bernstein, Toni Morrison, Marvin Gaye, Charlie Mingus and Duke Ellington — the preponderance are African Americans, the historic -- and kindred -- underclass. Calder is in the cufflinks. Even Bernstein manages to “pass,” as his jazz symphonies connect with Ellington’s symphonic jazz. The Jewish Lebowitz typically connects to the African American artist.
Lebowitz’s stories about the tormented Mingus — whom her mother appreciated as “a good eater” — are a dramatic counterpoint to her exalting of music as the most satisfying art, musicians the most beloved, for expressing emotions and memories and providing happiness. “It’s like a drug that doesn’t kill you.” There is joy in the music, pain in the production.
Scorsese cites Wharton’s Age of Innocence not because he filmed it but because a school exam was criticized for citing its reference to the Countess having lost her looks. That might disturb schoolgirls, the silly Culture Canceller contended. But art is not intended to lull and to reassure -- and to delude. As Marvin Gaye declares, the artist is “only interested in waking up the minds of men” — the implicit audience including women, even girls.
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