I love New York City, which was why when starting class this semester I was really excited. The class was called Arts in New York City, what else would we possibly be talking about? Throughout the course I had the task of watching movies with different stories to tell and different meanings. The one common factor between them being that they were all set in New York City. An interesting thing about this is that they all shared a different representation of what the city was. It is difficult to say which was my favorite because they all had a certain feel about the city that I agreed with.
For example in Wall Street themes of greed and moral ambiguity are explored. The movie’s big antagonist, Gordon Gecko is a stockbroker who so famously states, “Greed is good”; I agree with this representation of wealthy people in the city. Some of them do happen to be incredibly vain and frankly, really full of themselves. It reminds me of the story of the past seminar class’ encounter with two women at the opera. They were judging the students and thought little of them when in fact by acting that way they made themselves look mean and I can imagine, really stupid.
On the other side there was The Muppets Take Manhattan, where a group of friends try to make it in the Big Apple. Some might call me gullible but I seriously do believe that people can come to the city and achieve their dreams. Now let me clarify a bit, when I say dreams, I don’t mean everyone can come here and become big and famous. I mean that New York is a place where you can do something positive for yourself. Not just as an actor or singer but as anything, you can be happy in the city, it is possible people!
Like I talked about in my NYC Films blog the city to me is certainly not exactly like what was depicted in the Muppets film or what was depicted in Wall Street. New York City is not perfect, nothing in the world is. Everything has its good and bad parts. Like in Do the Right Thing we see racial tensions and stereotypes collide in a NYC neighborhood. I do agree that, even though it is the 21st century race is still a problem in this country and especially in NY, the so called ‘liberal haven’. In Moonstruck however, (no matter how overblown I felt it was) the two characters managed to find each other, fall in love, and get married. That happens in the city all the time which in my opinion means there must be good things here if that can happen.
For me these films all had some aspect of the city incorporated into their stories but only one certain aspect of it, never all of them. (Not that I blame filmmakers, I imagine it would be really confusing trying to fit so many conflicting realities together) Looking back on everything we saw I feel they had some truth to them, but to go ahead and judge NYC on only one of these works would be kind of dumb. I mean, when looking at the reviews for something online, you don’t just look at one and stop. No, you look at a few and try to get an overall feel of what you’re looking at. That is what I feel should be done when talking about the city in the context of these arts. Don’t just look at one film, for instance, Wall Street, don’t look at that and say ugh, this is so true, NYC is full of such greedy people, it’s a bad place. Sure, NYC can be truly awful sometimes, but it can also be really great. I say we should just accept that NYC is a city that is truly ambiguous. Some people may love it and some people may hate it but that’s just how it is and always will be.
