As a New Yorker I sometimes forget to be impressed by the grandeur of my home. Having lived here my whole life, I feel like there’s so much more to the city then what I’ve seen. Knowing people who live outside of New York and are constantly trying to absorb as much of this city as they can motivates me to do the same. This semester I was able to do this through film, opera, interpretive dance, and plays. Many of these works allowed different views of New York and some of them overlapped. Often times media portrays New York as a magical place—not that it’s not—but they seem to forget the problems that New York faces. The Muppets take Manhattan is permitted the romanticizing of New York, as it as a children’s film and underage prostitution is perhaps not an appropriate platform for their thoughts. Moonstruck, being a romantic comedy, has a similar portrayal of New York; I don’t think it’s as justified, although I recognize that the setting didn’t play as big a role as it did in other movies. Breakfast at Tiffany’s utilized this same idea but slightly differently—the film had us wondering how a woman lived the life of an elite without the budget of one. Wall Street showed the dirty ways of climbing from the budget of Holly Golightly to sitting on the pile of cash like Gordon Gecko. The willingness to do anything for money is also seen in The Producers which showed us that this nature exists outside of the business world and how it affects the arts. Our idea of class distinction was further propelled when we went to watch Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera; we got to experience it first hand simply by sitting in the audience. The New York City of Taxi Driver allows a man struggling with post traumatic stress disorder a violent outlet based on the horrors of those less financially fortunate he sees during his night shift as a cab driver. A Sucker Emcee used a combination of hip-hop and poetry to talk about the struggles of growing up in a poor family and being exposed to the dangers of the slightly concealed world. Do the Right Thing uses administrative violence while Yellow Face uses racial discrimination to speak out against a problem that is still very pertinent in today’s society. Recent Tragic Events and The 25th Hour both approached the topic of a very grave and sensitive topic—one was very explicit in it’s categorization of people while the other used the event as a way to bring two character together as humans. Aside from Birds with Sky Mirrors, the problems and struggles of the movies we’ve seen continue to be important in today’s society.
My favorite of the works we’ve seen this semester is also the one I feel is most truthful to the New York I know. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing portrays the tension in a community of minorities. Sal’s sons, Vito and Pino, have their disputes and the tension rises when Mookie gets involved. There’s tension when Buggin’ Out demands that Sal have a black person up on his Wall of Fame and Sal refuses. But the tension of the film climaxes when the police get involved and Radio Raheem is killed in a chokehold by one of the cops.
I was raised in a middle class family in Queens. I’ve been taking the train for several years now and as a young white woman I have never been stopped by a cop. I am a beneficiary of the stereotype that exists. Having said that I recognize how ridiculous that sounds. Just because I look a certain way I’m assumed to be innocent until I do something to prove otherwise, which is the way it should be. Learning about the civil rights movement for the first time I remember thinking, I’m so glad racism isn’t a thing anymore, it sounds ridiculous. As my eyes were opened to racism in America I remember thinking, this could never happen in New York. But over the past couple of months I’ve learned otherwise. Some of the works I’ve been exposed to have exposed me to truths I’ve been missing as puzzle pieces that make up the city. As it turns out this puzzle is not complete yet, it’s constantly changing and I have hope that the issues we face today will be a part of history textbooks not realities of the city’s residents.
