“It’s impossible to be a satirist at this moment,” says the irascible Fran Lebowitz, commenting on the absurdity of our time. She’s the subject of Martin Scorsese’s “Pretend It’s a City,” a seven-part Netflix Original Documentary Series built around the director’s filmed conversations with Lebowitz in a private New York club and a recent Lebowitz talk-back at a Gotham theater as well as archival footage spanning several decades of her televised conversations with Alec Baldwin, Spike Lee and David Letterman.
Running through “Pretend It’s a City” is Lebowitz’s two-parts love, one-part hate relationship with the city she proudly calls home. Lebowitz was 18 when she arrived in New York and ensconced herself in the feverishly fertile culture of ‘70s Manhattan. She landed on the island with $200 in her jeans and the idea of making it there at a time when being interesting was an asset.
Although best known as a writer (her essays appeared in Interview and Vanity Fair), on camera Lebowitz is like a Borscht Belt comedian, hilarious with well-timed jabs at the common pretenses of contemporary life. About “wellness,” which grew from mom and pop “seeds and teas” into an industry whose nostrums preoccupy America’s upper-middle class, she says, “Your bad habits can kill you, but your good habits won’t save you.” Sparring amicably with Spike Lee over sports fandom, she responds to his praise of team spirit by pointing out that teams are just corporations. Do we go around cheering for Coke’s win over Pepsi?
Opinionated, frank and funny, Lebowitz came of age during a rare moment when numbers of people became unafraid to think for themselves and speak their thoughts publicly. She sails proudly through our Charybdis and Scylla—the opposing danger zones of present-day culture. On one side: trolls, which she describes as “incredibly critical in crazy ways.” On the other: the squishy norm where everything is dismissed as “great”—unless it could conceivably cause someone offense. For Lebowitz, political correctness overreaches when schools ban Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence for an observation about aging women that some girls could find “hurtful.” She adds, however, that banning the book might encourage kids to read it.
When she isn’t talking, Scorsese’s camera follows Lebowitz as she makes her rounds around Manhattan, flipping off the bicyclist who nearly runs into her and maneuvering around pedestrians with faces glued to cellphones instead of the world around them. In one scene Scorsese flashes Lebowitz’s face onto a big video screen overlooking Times Square, the only part of New York she disdains. Thanks to recent mayors, the tourist-safe attraction “looks like my grandmother’s apartment,” she scoffs. Scorsese also includes archival footage from the ‘70s, The New York Dolls performing “Jet Boy” and Max’s Kansas City, one of the club’s where punk rock was nurtured.
Lebowitz isn’t a young rebel any longer but she’s still kicking against stupidity and inanity wherever she finds it. It’s been a busy life and as she concludes, “I don’t want to die but if I did, it wouldn’t be a tragedy.”
