This week Time Out New York released its list of the 100 Best movies shot in New York. All the Internet loves a list, and as such things go it’s well done, but while cycling through it I couldn’t help but think that perhaps the world—and American movies—would be a great deal better off if New York City got a little time off.
There is an attitude prevalent among New Yorkers, whether they fess up to it or not, which is that their lives are—by virtue of the highly-recognizable background that they’re being lived in front of—especially important. This is particularly rampant among passers-by living out a few seasons of a Seinfeld/Friends/Sex and the City/How I Met Your Mother/Girls fantasy, though there is also a sizable population of chest-thumping native New Yorkers who prefix sentences with the statement “I’m a native New Yorker…” as if it’s an actual accomplishment rather than a matter of geographical happenstance.
This attitude is reinforced by the disproportional representation of New York City as a backdrop—this is, after all, where stories take place. Which is not to say that Gotham has cornered the location-shooting market. A great many contemporary films make use of Los Angeles (motivated by cut-corner bone-laziness) and Boston (motivated by the desire to make a movie about the criminal underclass without using black actors), and if a film’s location is not specified you can bet that it’s shot in Vancouver (green-and-gray palette), Shreveport (scented with po’ boys), Toronto (native Torontonians cannot recognize Toronto on film), or some combination of the three.
But the Bloomberg administration has been a good friend to film and television production since 2002, encouraging record levels of investment and employment. From a business standpoint, this is doubly smart: not only does the “Made in NY” incentive program create jobs—always politically popular—but it reinforces “New York City” as a brand, encouraging future tourism and NYU enrollment. Not to say that your average Bloomberg-era New York City movie—and there are relatively few that appear on the Time Out list, though among them are such unimpeachable choices as James Grey’s Two Lovers—has a dialogue with the city that goes any deeper than, say, an establishing helicopter shot of the Manhattan skyline (remember when these weren’t de rigeur?) and possibly a scene that takes place at Shake Shack. It’s a far cry from transcribing onto celluloid the scent of “subway farts,” to take a phrase from a Michael Atkinson write-up of The French Connection that has always lingered with me.
What is sorely missing in all of this is the sense of digging into the byways and offramps of our nation for stories, a sense associated with what I call the “Discover America” period of the 1960’s and, particularly, 1970’s—I think of Phoenix, Arizona in The Gauntlet; San Antonio, Texas in Rolling Thunder; Stockton, California in Fat City. Like the tee-shirt says, ‘I HEART New York,’ but let’s give it a rest.
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I am, it is generally known, a cat fancier. This has sometimes infringed on my critical faculty; I have never, for example, been able to forgive Bela Tarr the cat torture scene in Satantango. Though I fully believe Tarr’s statement that the scene was supervised by SPCA overseers, and that he adopted the cat in question after the shoot wrapped, I can’t help but think of Klaus Kinski’s cutting comments on Werner Herzog in the former’s great autobiography, Kinski Uncut a/k/a All I Need is Love a/k/a I Am So Wild About Your Strawberry Mouth, saying that Herzog turned to animal torture whenever his movies started to drag. Certainly this is true of a number of pictures trashier than Tarr’s or Herzog’s, in which feline sacrifice is used as a symbol of dark and serious intention. I think offhand of The Book of Eli and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to cite two recent examples. How much more affectionate one feels for the always-human and humane Chris Marker, who coined the memorable aphorism: “The owl is to the cat what the angel is to man.”
Perhaps because of my great partiality for cats, I have not harbored one in more than a dozen years, largely out of abject fear of eventually losing it—as Louis C.K. has joked (paraphrasing): “The gift of a pet is really the gift of eventual but inevitable and utter heartbreak.”
Yet after scrupulously keeping myself free of such potentially-painful ties, I recently came into possession of a pair of sixteen-year old (!) cats, one of whom—a butterball-turkey shaped Russian Blue named Spanky—passed on this 4th of July, following the example set by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Despite the inevitable and utter sadness resulting, I find I now only have cause to regret my many barren, catless years, thinking to Dickens in The Old Curiosity Shop: “Thus it will always happen that these men of the world, who go through it in armour, defend themselves from quite as much good as evil; to say nothing of the inconvenience and absurdity of mounting guard with a microscope at all times, and of wearing a coat of mail on the most innocent occasions.”
What does all of this have to do with the Seventh Art? Absolutely nothing—I’m just saying, get a cat, they’re great. By way of attempting to tie things together, however, here are some pictures of black cat auditions, for a segment of the 1962 horror anthology Tales of Terror.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.