- American film director Martin Scorses and analyst Fran Lebowitz have collaborated to make a documentary about New York culture.
- Titled Pretend It’s a City, the Netflix docu-series is made up of seven parts.
- Filmed before Covid-19 engulfed the city, Pretend It’s a City features the city’s ever-transforming art scene as its most prominent subject.
American film director Martin Scorses is considered as one of the most significant filmmakers in the Hollywood Renaissance era (1965 to 1980s) and beyond. His fictional work has and continues to validate and uplift patriarchy.
Cultural analyst, columnist and author Fran Lebowitz is an American treasure, valued for her sardonic New Yorker take on life in the States. In 2021 the New York duo has come together to offer audiences a nostalgic look at a pandemic-free New York.
Titled Pretend It’s a City, the Netflix docu-series is made up of seven parts. In them, Lebowitz makes her way through New York on foot, stopping at some of the city’s most prominent venues to conduct interviews or give talks related to New York’s ongoing transformation.
Filmed before Covid-19 engulfed the city, Pretend It’s a City features the city’s ever-transforming art scene as its most prominent subject. However Lebowitz does not do so without considering transportation, migration, books and money among other markers of life in New York.
Of the many analysts he could have worked with, Scorsese’s decision to work with Lebowitz is two fold.
The first points to them being long time friends and collaborators with their previous project being Public Speaking, a biography about Lebowitz’s practice and influence.
The second reason is best summed up by a statement Lebowitz makes in the series: “Judging is my profession”. With a writing career that spans 5 decades, Pretend It’s a City almost acts as a summation of the many things she has written about.
In addition to being ushered into the industry as a columnist for Andy Warhol’s magazine Interview, Lebowitz is closely tied to artists like Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe. Over the years her intimate understanding of the city’s ins and outs, its elite and their practices have made her an authority on the city’s ever morphing cultural community.
With Lebowitz as a tour guide, New York is a queer dramatic comedy. Describing her narration style, Time magazine said the following: “Firm as she may be in her opinions, as a conversationalist she’s sly, self-deprecating, good-natured, with impeccable comic timing.”
To encapsulate the series, here are five of some of its most memorable quotables:
- “Most people who love to write are terrible writers.”
- “Nothing is better for a city than a dense population of angry homosexuals.”
- “We live in a world where they applaud the price, not the Picasso.”
- “A book isn’t supposed to be a mirror—it’s supposed to be a door.”
- “I have no guilty pleasures, because pleasure never makes me feel guilty.”
Overall, from the perspective of a non-New Yorker, the series works to introduce audiences to her ideas as much as it does to reveal some of New York’s inner workings. And although it's meant to be about New York, Pretend It’s a City is fascinating to watch mostly as a means to see Scorsese’s adoration for Lebowitz play out on film for the second time. Their friendship and shared reverence for each other is palpable and humanises the seemingly unapproachable Lebowitz. It does not, however excuse the ways Scorsese continues to sideline or exclude femme leads from his version of Hollywood.