Reeler Pinch Hitter: Noel Murray, The A.V. Club
[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues. Noel Murray writes about all things popular and cultural for The A.V. Club and the Nashville Scene. He lives in the thriving metropolis of Conway, AR—population 40,000.]
I’ve never been to Los Angeles, but I think I understand it. I’ve lived my whole life in small towns and suburbs–mostly in the south–and when I see Los Angeles in movies and on TV, it makes sense to me. Strip malls, subdivisions, supermarkets… this is what I’m used to. I blame Spielberg and sitcoms for my nearly lifelong desire to live in California–a thought that makes a lot of my friends shudder. But I can’t help it; Hollywood makes West Coast suburbia look like the life I’m used to, only bigger and cleaner and newer.
“The flip side”: (L-R) Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets
I’ve never been to New York City either, but based on what I’ve seen in movies, I don’t “get” New York. The city seems nice enough on film–especially in that bronzed, autumnal phase that filmmakers are so drawn to–and I can almost relate what I’ve seen of New York in movies to other cities I’ve spent time in, like Boston or D.C. or Toronto. (Though not the cities I know best: Nashville and Atlanta.) I’ve ridden subways. I’ve walked through Chinatowns. I’ve stayed in fancy old hotels. But New York still doesn’t make any sense to me.
The reason? Nobody seems to live there. New York on film is all apartments and offices and Central Park, with trips to restaurants and bars and ballgames and the Met, and there’s a lot of moving from one place to another on trains and taxis. But New York is so big that all the individual spaces look disconnected–like a series of movie sets. Even Do The Right Thing, shot on location in one Brooklyn block, looks abstracted and unreal. I miss the sense of continuous space I get from, say, a movie by Curtis Hanson or Alexander Payne, whose greatest directorial gifts are related to the way they can make Pittsburgh or Omaha look like a complete world, so detailed that you almost feel like you could drive from one location to another without a map.
I confess that my fascination with cinema is as much voyeuristic as it is aesthetic. I’m constantly scanning movies–especially old movies–for flashes of familiarity. Real restaurant menus, real home interiors, real magazine covers and office parks. Other people may hate product placement, but I kind of like it, because it means that in 20 years I’ll be able to go back and see what a Mountain Dew can looked like in 2006. I’ve often said that movies are a substitute for the diaries and scrapbooks I don’t keep; and movies from the early ’70s in particular allow me to piece together parts of my childhood that I barely remember.
But New York movies aren’t much help to me. Maybe it’s that the city is too fixed in time, full of skyscrapers and brownstones that have been standing since the early 20th century. Meanwhile the suburbs and exurbs continue to change–some would say too rapidly. As it is, the New York movies that speak to me strongest are the ones that spend most of their time out of the city, like On Dangerous Ground, which starts as a remarkably lively urban policier, and then heads out to the sticks. Or The Ice Storm, which is about people who live in Connecticut but work in New York, and which lets audiences feel both their closeness to the city and their physical and emotional remove.
Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm
Don’t get me wrong: I like movies set in New York. The ones I like best are the ones that let me in a little, like Mean Streets or Midnight Cowboy or Madigan, all of which show a seedy but very lived-in New York. I wouldn’t want to live there, but at least I can almost picture it. On the flip side, I’d have no idea how to live in the New York of An Affair To Remember or Breakfast At Tiffany’s. And as much as I like Woody Allen films, I can’t picture what it would be like to live inside Annie Hall–except for maybe in the scenes where Allen and Diane Keaton go to the movies.
Maybe that’s the problem: that people in New York movies don’t spend enough times in multiplexes. Or grocery stores. Or banks (unless they’ve got guns and ski masks handy). I have little sense of what it’s like to live in New York in the minutest sense. Do you ever swing by a fast-food drive-through on the way home from work? Do you hit the convenience store for a 20 oz. Coke? Where do you buy gas? Or open checking accounts? I can’t get my toddler to sit in her stroller or hold my hand when we take a walk around our quiet cul-de-sac; how do you ferry your young around New York?
Oddly enough, the piece of entertainment that gives me the greatest sense of how a person might live day-to-day in NYC is Seinfeld, which always moved its characters from one mundane locale to the next—including drugstores and health clubs and malls and movie theaters. I get such a strong sense of New York every time I watch Seinfeld, it always takes me a minute to remind myself that the whole show was shot in L.A.
It ain’t exactly realism, but Abel Ferrara’s DRILLER KILLER seems to get the texture pretty right. And having watched INSIDE MAN a couple of months after attending the Tribeca Film Fest, the streets in the movie look an awful lot like the ones I’d been treading between screenings. It is rare for movies shot in the city to look anything like it does at ground level; maybe since LA is itself rather unreal, the disconnect is less. Half of LA is built to be filmed, anyway.