The Rental

  Actor Dave Franco’s debut as writer/director is an impressive expression of these times. 

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen this film don’t read on.

Like the classic whodunit, the horror mystery is usually a whosdoingit. That is, we play Guess the Killer from the array of Usual Suspects. Also, there is also usually a survivor, or two, you know, to encourage our spirit to Carry On. We want to feel scared not hopeless.

Not here. Both couples are killed off, as is the only other speaking role in the main body. And the killer, once exposed, is unnamed, faceless, unknown beyond his role as high-tech voyeur and slaughterer. 

The two central couples are polished, attractive identification figures for us. Charlie and his brother Josh’s girlfriend Mina are bright successful designers of something, celebrating a big contract. Hence their weekend getaway to a posh private rental. 

Josh is a troubled soul, a college drop-out with an assault record, who “hit the jackpot” in winning Mina. As Charlie’s lover Michelle thinks she did, until the drugs and booze shatter the relationships.The accomplished characters exemplify the civilization here at risk. With every advantage the two couples are helpless under this attack.  

In making Mina an ethnic minority sensitive to discrimination, the drama expands its sense of currency. Estate manager Taylor is a racist, sexist, sinister working man, clearly the Professional Class’s nightmare. That is, the central cast embodies the current division in America, where the economic and cultural gap has led to an unbridgeable divide. 

This chasm is set against the opulence of the holiday retreats. Expensive rentals in the glorious wild, who could ask for anything more? But every Eden has its serpent. This idyll is shattered by an inescapable evil. 

More to the point: that evil is Unknown. It’s a force beyond the antagonistic social camps represented by the first five characters we meet. Also, while its savagery is as basic as a hammer it has a remarkable technical savvy, as the villain reveals when he continues to rent a place, install his voyeuristic technology and proceed to kill on. He has the “motiveless malignity” Coleridge attributed to Iago, but with enviable electronic savvy.

That’s the point of the film. America’s — indeed, the free world’s — division into two unaccommodating camps leaves it helpless before an outside threat worse than their suspected enemy. The core having crumbled, there can be no survivors within that society, only the rampaging evil extending its campaign. Complacency kills. 

 

Nomadland

  As Nomadland reflects current America it focuses on the massive underclass that has been increasingly marginalized, impoverished, i.e., the people that the Republicans promise to serve by giving the wealthy their huge tax breaks. Perhaps only an immigrant woman like China's Chloe Zhao could grab such a trenchant insight.

The opening title cites the annihilation of a sheetrock-based town called Empire. The town died when its industry died. No government aid came to the rescue. Even the mail zip code evaporated. Fern and dead hubby Bo loved Empire, from their house on the edge of town with an uninterrupted vista of the desert. Then life on the edge was idyllic. Before the sheetrock died.

Of course when even a real item steps into a fiction it transforms into potential metaphor. Hence this microcosm — America as Empire has collapsed.

Why sheetrock? It’s a basic element in construction, a mix of paper and gypsum, of the ephemeral and the stable. Absent this fundament of construction the society disintegrates. So Fern drifts among the uprooted, finding there the community denied her in “normal” society.

Why “Fern”? The name evokes an essential vegetation, an outline of foliage, but a sprig of life against that landscape of rock. The desert has lost its foliage. Kid sister Dolly remembers Fern’s bravery and insightfulness — the hole she left Dolly when she left. “That one’s on me,” Fern admits.

The narrative is framed by Fern’s work at Amazon. That's the new “empire” of American commerce, the monster that is replacing the community of small local retailers, basing its bargains on more exploitation. 

As it refers to the community of wanderers, “Nomadland” is also a variation on No-mans-land, in two senses. It’s not the space between two conflicting parties but the national cost of the class war in America. That’s less a war than a tyranny.

The term also de-genders the original. The most moving testimonies come from women — Swankie, Merle, Linda, with Fern our figure of identification and entrance. Gender is no issue here. There is no sexual tension or threat. The one possibility of romance — suitably performed by the two prominent pros amid the effective amateurs — stays platonic. The odd beard apart, aging and poverty make it hard to discern the gender.

Frances McDormand plays Fern as a sentient but wholly de-romanticised woman. Her skin is as dry as the desert, with saving fertility in her feeling eyes and smile. Her bowel scenes frame her de-romanticising of the usual heroine — and of the mythic American Dream for women.  

While the women embody courage and generosity, the organizer of the RV community, Bob, has the traditional patriarchal emblems of Mosaic mane, beard and rhetoric. As the poor are always with us Bob can confidently say “I’ll see you down the road.” Given their narrowed range of mobility, the poor will meet again, especially when this confidence embraces the afterlife. That’s how the group see off their dead.

Bob’s purpose is to rescue the workers the society has exploited and abandoned: “The way I see it is that the Titanic is sinking and economic times are changing. And so my goal is to get the lifeboats out and get as many people into the lifeboats as I can.” 

The lifeboat image echoes Merle’s coworker Bill, who worked too late to enjoy retirement on his sailboat: “So I retired as soon as I could. I didn't want my sailboat to be in the driveway when I died. So... yeah. And it's not. My sailboat is out here in the desert.” The image of sailing on the desert encapsulates their hopelessness — and their saving dream, community.

In contrast to the unregulated capitalism that has reduced them, these nomads are mutually supportive, generous within their maximal limits. Their “business”  is giving or bartering.  The people who have virtually nothing exemplify what the people who grab everything might consider … trying — to share the nation’s wealth. To serve the common weal.

The film benefits hugely from its largely nonprofessional cast, using their own names. Swankie’s reminiscence of epiphanies — the moose, the little white swallows on the water — feel like memories that could not be scripted. Thoughts of her dogs pulled Linda back from suicide.  This is life bursting free from someone else’s script, as the townsfolk and Empire could not.

Then there’s the paradox of “real” estate. As Fern points out, “It’s strange that you encourage people to invest their whole life savings, go into debt, just to buy a house they can't afford.” This may offend the real estate agents in the house, but it feeds Fern’s distinction that she is not “homeless” but “houseless.” She has a larger home than the sheetrock can define, as she acknowledges a larger community than herself.

The paralyzing class structure echoes in the breakdown of families. Bo didn’t have parents. He and Fern didn’t have kids. But the basic unit of connection is where hope lies. Dave (actor David Strathairn) returns to the family he abandoned. Having failed as a father he takes Fern’s instruction: ”Go be a grandfather.” A timely, substantial “loan” from Dolly saves Fern’s house/home.  

In these examples of mutual support the personal connotes the national. America has forgotten the promise of its Empire -- equality in citizenship and opportunity, a refuge from the foreign tyrannies and injustices. That’s the resonance of Fern’s explanation why she stayed in Bo’s beloved Empire after he died: “He loved being there, everybody loved him. So I stayed. Same town, same house. Just like my dad used to say: ‘What's remembered lives.’ I maybe spent too much of my life just remembering, Bob.” 

America’s key forgetting is the loss of her defining ideals. This is how Dolly explains her vagrant sister: “You know, I think that what the nomads are doing is not that different than what the pioneers did. I think Fern's part of an American tradition.” Fern is what America was when it was a dream of freedom, equality, a supportive community of independents. Before the Empire died. Before sheetrock became its only concept of construction. 

SHTISEL Season 3: The Last Shot

 Ruchami Dies

Clearly the Israeli TV series Shtisel has surpassed the medium’s normal insights and quality. But the ambiguous last shot of Season 3 opens a deeper possibility. This drama plunges us into classical tragedy. 

Comfy viewers and the sponsors don’t like that. “Calm of mind, all passion spent” doesn’t sell much. So for their peace the writers suggest Ruchami survives her delivery. 

But for the attentive viewer, Ruchami dies. By not making her death undeniably explicit, the writers permit viewers to read her alive. But the three seasons of evidence firmly lead to her death. 

The last scene opens on an ominous long shot through curtains to hospital staff and family around Ruchami’s bed. When the family celebrates little Hannahleh’s arrival the shot is jarringly bright. Ruchami looks too hearty. The unreal “feel” is confirmed when she smiles at us. In real life we don’t smile and wink at someone in a different-reality audience out there. Her breaking the Fourth Wall shatters the realism. The last shot is not Ruchami’s “real life.”

Confirming that break, the music connects the hospital scene to the preceding, where the dead Shtisels visit the living. There is no music in the “realistic” start to that scene, the three men talking. The music starts on the I.B. Singer quotation and continues over the Ruchami scene. The music gives Ruchami the “reality” of the visiting dead.

The Singer quote simply confirms what the writers have established from the outset: the dead stay with us, watching, helping, even visiting for a chat. Ruchami’s posthumous visit follows those by mothers Malka, Dvora and Libbi. Here motherhood doesn’t end at death. Dvora hands Akiva some challah. 

Where most stories start by defining the physical setting this drama’s very first scene was Akiva’s dream of Dvora in the deli deep-freeze. The first episode of Season 3 has a wholly realistic vision of dead Libbi’s visit.  

The miracle of Ruchami’s blessed afterlife — which requires her death —gives this drama an emotional climax rare, if not unprecedented, on TV. As Giti’s “little Ruchami” replaces her mother, Ruchami’s death is a triumph. In both her pregnancies the doctors insist on terminating the baby to save the mother’s life, as the Torah requires. They overrule her the first time. At the baby’s burial, Ruchami rejects Hanina’s comforting with “I’m in that box.” This is her Death-in-Life.

The second time she forgoes surrogacy out of respect for Hanina’s religious concern. Accepting the odds against her survival, she prepares to die. She tapes “letters to my beloved little girl I will never give birth to.”  When she sleeps through Hanina’s playing her tapes she seems to be speaking from the dead. She promises her unborn daughter she will always be with her, watching her, if but from “another room.” That starts with the last shot. This is her Life-in-Death.

To deny this death is to diminish her heroism and tragedic dignity. Also — to ignore the entire drama’s faith in our alternative levels of spiritual existence.

But as the Facebook chatlines demonstrate, viewers prefer the cliche happy ending. That depends on a miracle, which an earlier scene warns us off. When Lippe begs God to take his life to save Ruchami’s he stumbles into a celestial glow. His miracle has been granted? Nope, it’s the headlights of the obstructed truck. So much for miracles. Lippe doesn’t get to sacrifice himself for his daughter; Ruchami does. Why? As the Bible continually reports, sacrifices have to be perfect. Also male, but Ruchami is a modern heroine. 

So resistant are viewers to this deepening that the Shtisel Official chatline on Facebook refused to run my proposed alternative reading . The director expelled me when I challenged her claim to have “from the writers” the assurance that Ruchami is alive! She didn’t. 

My Ruchami ending has another advantage. Call it my Lekovid Covid Clause. The drama was written, produced and aired during the pandemic. A crucial issue is the refusal of the orthodox of several faiths to accept the restrictions imposed by secular authorities for the public good. There have been protests, riots, closures — and many deaths and much more suffering as a result. That even beyond the offending communities. In this climate, basing a happy ending on prayer, on divine intervention, on the expectation of a miracle — is sadly dangerous. Giving Ruchami the heroic death she undertook is the most responsible as well as the happiest ending.   

I've written episode-by-episode analyses of the themes and structure of SHTISEL. The first two seasons are covered in READING SHTISEL. AFTER SHTISEL studies Season 3 and also the writers' intervening TV drama, AUTONOMIES. Both are available at lulu.com.  

Policeman (2011)

  As we know from Synonyms and The Kindergarten Teacher, Nadav Lapid takes a harsh, cold view of contemporary Israel. Here the title connotes a single force for law and order. But the landscape is rather a fragmentation of the state. Its member groups, the family, even the individual, are at war with each other — and within themselves.

There are four main groups of Israelis here. At the top is the fat, spoiled business class, complacent in its power. When the rebels interrupt the wedding to take hostages, that power briefly seems threatened. It’s reasserted by the legal slaughter at the end.

     Central figure Yaron leads the anti-terrorist special police unit. As he massages his pregnant wife he seems remarkably sensitive. But he’s ready to betray her with the inviting young waitress, at least until she reveals she’s under 16. His virtue is pragmatic. 

    His unit reeks of rampant masculine. There’s a trace of sabra idealism when the men cycle out to admire the desert beauty. But they are constantly physical, as in Yaron’s arrival at their party. The men slap and hug each other, relishing physical exchange. The party climaxes in a mass wrestle. It’s like they’re playing rugby without a ball. The skirmish is for its own sake, the exercise of the physical, that old devil “manliness.”

But even that unity is cracked. Yaron and the unit are under investigation for the wounding and killing of four civilians in an attack on a Most Wanted terrorist. As one comrade has cancer the unit has decided he should assume full responsibility for the transgression. Under their cold warmth he agrees. Even as Yaron massages his wife, she urges him to betray his friend to save himself. So even the feminine, the wife bearing a daughter, offers no check on macho unscrupulousness. 

The police unit represents Israeli law and order, bent upon enforcing its traditional values. But in that earlier raid we hear about and in the climactic one we see, it is unprincipled brutality. The force exceeds the human need. Having forgotten its ideals, this unit is like the rugby game without a ball. The violence has lost its purpose.

At the opposite extreme, a gang of idle Israeli punks blithely destroy a parked car, heedless of the woman owner’s witness. This is the police unit’s destructive violence without the ideals that initially motivated the nation and their security forces. This is “pure” nihilism, destruction without purpose. There is no suggestion these are terrorists or even Arab. This is violence purely for its own sake, leaving rubble without a cause.    

Between these outlaws and the cops fall the rebellious idealists. And they do.

This group is ideological, cultured, privileged. Shira is there not just because she loves the charismatic leader, Nathanael, but because she is passionate about returning Israel to its faded values. She’s a poet. 

Another is an excellent violinist. But their idealism is soon undercut. There is egotism, not camaraderie, in the violinist’s humiliation of the beggar. So much for their egalitarian ideals. 

Shira is naive when she calls on the police to recognize their kinship in even their oppression. They feel too much swagger to identify. She undercuts her own position when she turns on the voluntary hostage bride: "You are not a woman, but a bride. You have no face- you've got make up. You have no breasts, but perfectly fitted bra. You have no body - you have this dress. And this dress is exactly in the size of your personality.” So much for her call to a common oppression. In fact, the bride has proved arguably the film’s most courageous figure when she insists on staying with her father as hostage, begging for his release. 

In reverse, a rebel’s father joins his son on the doomed mission. There’s no mother here, only the masculine. Himself a veteran of idealistic campaigns, the father initially locks up his son, to save him. When the lad threatens suicide the father relents, but goes with him to the fatal demonstration. Both are lost in the final sweep. Like the “family” police unit, the wedding family, and even Yaron’s ostensible fidelity, Israel’s fragmentation seeps down even to the family unit.

Of course, these young idealists don’t have a chance against the heavily armed and armoured police unit. The question is: Does Israel?

Perhaps the last shot presents some hope. Yaron looks down on the dying Shira and seems to pause to think. How we think he reacts probably reveals us more than him. Does he see her as his lost idealistic self? Does she remind him that Israel’s enemies are the genocidal terrorists, not Israeli Jews of however alien class? Does he see the daughter his wife is carrying? Or, more cynically, another lost waitress? Will he change or continue?  

I respect and admire Lapid as a filmmaker. I object to his focus on Police Israel, exposng its institutionalized violence, but framing out the conditions that have caused it. Nowhere does Lapid acknowledge the state’s existential threat both from its neighbours and its fifth column citizenry. Lapid exposes Israel’s military focus but omits the dangers that require it. This judges Israel and not its genocidal enemies. Just this imbalance won Lapid’s Synonyms the Golden Bear at Berlin. Blaming Israel out of context is the popular thing to do. It’s easy.    

The Distinguished Citizen

  I read this film as an anatomy of the artist’s ego. From the opening ceremony to his panic flight from his home town Daniel Mantovani is a completely self-absorbed and destructive figure. Whether the resultant novels balance the scales is an unanswerable question. But the question stands: How far can art go to excuse the artist from the criteria for a good human being?     

        Daniel starts in the catbird seat — receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature — but in an aggressively disrespectful manner. He eschews the tuxedo, refuses to bow to the presiding royals and declares that he will now cease writing because that very award suggests he has not been upsetting enough to the literary world. He stands silently in front of the stunned audience — until they arise to applaud. As he expected.

He lives in a palatial estate. The massive library curving under his main floor suggests that culture is the foundation of his house, his life. As he proceeds through a litany of refusing invitations and cancelling engagements that anchor seems to weigh him down. Impetuously accepting an immediate visit to his small home town confirms his exclusive self-concern. Distinguished he may well be, but he falls far short on "citizen."

Daniel’s return to the small town which he fled — and refused to return to, even for his father’s funeral — is into the lion’s den. What begins as the town’s fulsome celebration of their world-famous escapee turns into their vicious rejection. His succession of car breakdowns proves the animosity mutual.

Daniel has been basing his stories on the people and places he remembers from that town, Salas. We see it as a dismal, empty, pedestrian community that shrinks further in its every pretension to honour him: the windy mayor, the honorary citizen medal, the volunteer fire department, the vapid beauty queen. On the spectrum of classical music it’s a Mantovani.

Whatever his reason for returning there, Daniel refuses to respect the town and its people. He’s courteous to the man who invites him home for lunch. But the request to fund a young man’s $10,000 wheelchair becomes an opportunity for him to lecture the father on the inappropriateness of personal charity. 

The disaster begins when Daniel heads a jury selecting works for the community art show. He shows no respect for the community’s needs and responsibilities, rejecting works here for the reasons he might in Buenos Aires or Madrid. He promotes one work for an accidental expressiveness that attests to Daniel’s sophistication not the artist’s. The consequent attack on him spreads from his disrespect for their efforts to his insulting treatment of their people and traditions jn his fiction.  

Given the references to Borges and the Latin American setting, we might be primed to expect Magic Realism. The stark colours in the streets, the vulgarity in the Volcano bar, the extravagant characterization may approach that — but the ending cinches it. 

Daniel is forcibly taken on a wild pig hunt by his old friend Antonio (who married Daniel’s old girlfriend Irene) and the yob dating their daughter. Still jealous of Irene’s long-held love for Daniel, Antonio takes great pleasure in running him out of town, especially as he fires his rifle at him, narrowly missing. But Daniel is felled by the yob, whose specialty has been defined as efficiently killing the prey their clients miss.

So. Does Daniel die there? Could be. Then the epilogue in which his publisher presents him with his new novel, based on that trip, could be the last story the novelist tells. He’s telling it to himself. His reappearance sans beard lets him live the story he told earlier of the two rival brothers, both doomed to murder.  

Or Daniel survives the marksman’s shot, is rushed to a hospital and flown home, where his replay of the adventures we have witnessed turns into his new novel. The scar he reveals could be from that hunt — or some other accident. This ending may be harder to believe. It’s also undercut by the pointlessly loud glasses he wears at the end, implying an exaggeration of vision.

We don’t have to choose between those endings. For the point is that Daniel is compelled to tell stories. To pontificate, as re:the wheelchair. To strike a posture whether dominant or recessive, as when he responds to the young woman’s question about whether an artist needs to suffer in order to create. No, he says now, but she pops up with the proof that he said the reverse elsewhere.

It’s because he has to tell a story that he can’t maintain an ethical responsibility. So he'll abandon the wheelchair denial. He slips into the matinee seduction by that young woman. Indeed he’s on the verge of describing it to friend Antonio when the woman appears — she’s Irene’s and Antonio’s daughter. 

Daniel will do anything, on impulse, for the sake of a good story. That’s why he leans over to kiss Irene in her stalled car — as if testing a new (and disastrous) plot-line. He lives to narrate. His roots are in his library not his emotions and relationships. Great artists live by their own standards. That’s how we lesser console ourselves. 

  

Boreg (Self-made)

  Israeli director Shira Geffen interweaves the alienation of two women, a famous Israeli avant-garde artist and a beleaguered Palestinian labourer. Both move through life detached, stymied by the world around them. 

        She initially connects them with a missing screw. Indeed. the Israeli title means "screw loose." Artist Michal loses one while trying to put together a new Ikea-style bed. (The company name Itaka suggests  'ethics'). After her raging complaint, Nadine is unjustly fired for apparently having failed to bag the correct number of screws. She drops screws on her path to help her find her way home. That’s her prosaic version of Michal’s exploratory installation, performance and video art.

When the women cross paths— at a checkpoint, of course, where their cultures collide — they assume each other’s lives. Complicating that variation on the Prince and the Pauper story, the women look nothing like each other. Yet everyone accepts them in their new role. 

From that we can infer the general insensitivity to women’s character, needs, desires, the failure either to sense or to accept individuation. Palestinian, Israeli — for women bearing the next generation of enemies the distinctions are irrelevant. So, too, Michal’s husband — away on a tech conference — looks like the neighbour Nadine is having a furtive affair with. The Israeli soldier’s lover in the last scene could pass for Arab. Alternatively, the individuating traits we see are irrelevant to the issues of humanity in that conflicted climate. 

In one key shot the women meet on opposing escalators in the furniture store. But the shot has them moving sideways, laterally, as if to deny the characters’ vertical stratification. Neither rises, descends, or moves to progress. In the opening scene Michal lies in silence across the screen before falling out of bed, bruising her head. Her horizontality confirms her passivity, whether earlier as a very successful but politically ineffectual artist, or now in her amnesia.  

Perhaps the film’s key metaphor is the musical chef’s note that crabs wear their skeletons on the outside. That’s why he plays violin music to soften them for Michal’s romantic anniversary dinner (that her husband will miss). When the violinist has an organism from his own music he points to the onanistic nature of Michal's abstruse art. Michal’s exhibition is titled “Rolling the Insides Out.” Her new Biennale piece features the womb she has had removed, an artistic realization of her resolve not to have children.  "I don't want children" she screams on the phone to the furniture store manager, "I want a bed." 

        In contrast to the self-revealing Michal, Nadine lives a simpler, more prosaic manner. But her taciturn solidity and sexual initiative suggests she has a more solid character. She nurtures a private inner life that sustains her through her personal and job issues.

         Suggesting a marriage tension, Michal's husband has an additional problem, which is related to the society's reduction of women. His computer has been overrun with graphic pornography. The techie hired to purge it advises Michal to warn her husband against inviting it. In one compelling shot, Michal can't give her father a screen kiss because his face has been reduced to a small square on the porn woman's vagina. That is a perverse parody of birthing.   

The heroines' exchange of roles is heavily symbolic. Initially Michal has literally forgotten who she is. Nadine continues Michal’s catatonic remove from her interview with a German TV crew. When the German cameraman provokes her violence he exposes his own, gloating that the supposed Israeli peacenik is violent herself. His self-projecting allegation of violence is directed against the Israeli but could also apply to the Palestinian. Nadine’s pregnancy turns functional the profusion of nursery furniture the store has dumped on Michal. 

Completing the switch, Michal is equipped with the suicidal bomb assigned Nadine. We don’t know whether she will achieve that end or not. The fatal mission is at least delayed when Nadine’s neighbour’s younger son pauses to buy roses — for his mother. On the stone wall Michal passes her painting of large yellow flowers, the hopeful emblem of art reviving a hardened obstructive nature. Small flowers adorn both women's dresses as they cross their lateral paths in the store. 

The English title is pointedly ambiguous. The store deals in furniture their customers will put together — make — themselves. But as both women try to find coherence in their fragmented, numbing lives, they are fumblingly trying to find their own integrity, wholeness, being. They are as boxed a bunch of pieces as the eruption of Itaka cartons brings.

This region's political drama is usually played out in films by the men. Warriors play their war. Ms Geffen instead opts for a richly, ambiguously poetic vision that disables precise literalism. It is as moving as it is evocative.  

        There are a couple of personal notes. The director's actor husband plays the delivery man who asks if Michal needs help putting the furniture together -- then leaves before she can reply. Later the young soldier's leave cancellation means she must miss a concert by the director's singer brother. Geffen's art assumes a public platform and subject more committed than Michal's art scene, which is sharply satirized.

Pretend It's a City -- Episodes 1, 2

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.