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TALES
OF MANHATTAN: By Henry Jenkins False Starts
"Ah, No, Let me start this all over." In the opening montage of Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979), Allen's hesitations, revisions, and contradictions reflect his ambivalence towards New York. Sometimes, Allen emphasizes glamour and romance, sometimes aggravation and self doubt. In one passage, he "thrives on the hustle and bustle of the crowds and the traffic." In another, he is "desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage." Searching for a consistent vantage point from which to capture the totality of Manhattan in a single paragraph, he, of course, is doomed to fail. Allen's ambivalence is reinforced by the images and music. The still photographs, which borrow from classic representations of the city, are only loosely linked to the narration. The Soulvka King and the Empire Diner are treated with the same reverence as Times Square and the Guggenheim. A young couple kiss on a penthouse balcony; two black teenagers shoot baskets in the projects. Allen's narration suggests that the Gershwin soundtrack expresses the protagonist's romanticism, yet "Rhapsody in Blue" also uses jarring bursts of percussion, unanticipated fanfares, and syncopation to express the clashing and contradictory qualities of urban life. Allen makes no effort to coordinate the images and cutting to its rhythms. Only in the final moments do sound and image come together: fireworks burst over the Manhattan skyline and Gershwin's music explodes into a crescendo of clashing cymbals and pounding drumbeats. Images of the
Cinematic City
Lynch sought to bring greater clarity and sensuality to our "images" of our native cities and to design urban spaces with more striking features that would enable a more coherent "cognitive mapping" of their basic parameters. At the same time, Lynch recognized that city-dwellers needed to be taught to perceive their cities in new ways. Lynch saw urban studies as a way of building a more educated and appreciative audience for urban design. Lynch recognized that our "images" of cities, then, are partially shaped by formal properties of the cities themselves and partially by the process of perception and interpretation through which we construct mental representations of those properties. In The Image of the City, Lynch is interested primarily in the experiential process by which city dwellers develop a sense of their native turf. However, our mental maps of familiar cities incorporate not only memories of direct encounters but also second-hand experiences gained through mediated interactions with various representations of those cities -- paintings, photographs, written descriptions, films, television programs, and the like. In an oft-cited passage from America, Jean Baudrillard argues that visiting a European city where the urban environment seems to be a "reflection of the paintings" one has just scrutinized in the galleries, while Manhattan "seems to have stepped right out of the movies." This impression of Manhattan as a cinematic city is not surprising when one considers that one recent filmography of feature-length movies set in New York City listed more than 500 titles. In many cases, New York simply provides the setting for these films, a convenient and familiar backdrop for the narrative action, but this paper will be more centrally concerned with those cases where filmmakers sought to make movies about Manhattan, trying to give aesthetic shape to their own particular perceptions of America's most famous city. Such an essay can not, of course, exhaust the full range of urban images to circulate in the American cinema, but my goal is to focus attention on a set of aesthetic and ideological problems at the heart of representing the "cinematic city." For Lynch, the "legibility " of a city image was what enabled it to become such a powerful basis for affective associations and metaphoric meanings: "The image of the Manhattan skyline may stand for vitality, power, decadence, mystery, congestion, greatness, or what you will, but in each case that sharp picture crystallizes and reinforces the meaning." The image of a city, for Lynch, must remain "plastic to the perceptions and purposes of its citizens." The "city image" in film, however, already comes to us as interpreted through the powerful creative intelligence of an artist who wants us to see that skyline in a certain way. When Lynch writes about the "image of the city," then, he is primarily interested in formal features that make it harder or easier for us to grasp the city's essential structures, but when we discuss the cinematic image of the city, we are entering a space where formal and ideological issues merge. Reading Lynch from the perspective of someone who studies cinema and not cities, what I find most striking is that he discusses urban form in a vocabulary which closely parallels the ideals of the classically constructed narrative. Lynch, for example, speaks of a "melodic" structuring of landmarks and regions along a succession of paths, which he suggested might follow a "classical introduction-development-climax-conclusion" pattern. Yet, Lynch is acutely aware of the various factors that prevent the city from achieving such a classical narrative form, that disrupt or break down its coherent development or fragment our perceptions of it. An ill-considered development deal may mar the urban landscape, blocking our ability to see important landmarks or to move fluidly between nodes. In one sense, the cinema would seem to be the perfect form to express the dynamic properties of the city, since like urban design itself, cinema is a "temporal art form," but the cinema brings its own expectations about what a classically constructed story looks like -- expectations which urban-based stories often find themselves unable to satisfy. Classically constructed stories remain focused on particular characters, their motives, their goals, their memories, and their experiences. The challenge for the filmmaker is to create a story that situates the individual in relation to the city in such a way that the film preserves what is distinctive about the metropolis -- congestion, simultaneity, heterogeneity, randomness, fragmentation, in short, incoherence. SPATIAL STORIES The cinema emerged in the midst of a period of dramatic transformation within American culture. The urban population of the United States quadrupled in the forty years between 1870 and 1910. The cinema helped the United States to negotiate the tensions and uncertainties surrounding its transition from a predominantly pastoral society to a predominantly urban and suburban one. From the start, the American cinema was closely associated with the urban experience. The earliest films often documented a moment in time at a specific location, facilitating a process of virtual tourism. In Europe, such films typically linked colonial powers with the far-flung reaches of their empires. In the United States, cinema brought images of the emerging American metropolis to the hinterlands. Exhibition was the central economic force behind the vertically-integrated studio system which dominated American film production from the 1920s until the late 1940s. For the five major studios, their primary exhibition revenue came from the urban hubs where they owned almost all of the theaters. Rural and hinterland audiences were secondary markets. Urban markets determined what films would be made and what aesthetic sensibilities would dominate the American film industry. Consequently, the majority of Hollywood films of the studio era centered on urban experience, albeit with a certain nostalgia for America's pastoral past. The Hollywood cinema explained to city-dwellers the nature of their own experience and transmitted traces of that experience to a broader population being gradually absorbed into urban areas. Such films spoke to both immigrants from other countries who were hoping to better understand their new life in America and migrants from rural areas who were hoping to accommodate themselves to their new urban homes. This is not to say that the American cinema offered a coherent or totally accurate picture of urban life. Urbanization provoked highly charged and often deeply ambivalent feelings even for -- or perhaps especially for -- those who lived in New York or Los Angeles. Many were horrified by mass culture given the prevailing ideology of rugged individualism. Often, they came to the city seeking a social mobility and personal freedom they could not enjoy in the villages where their families had lived for generations. However, they also feared the alienation and isolation of inhabiting a world of strangers and they felt buffeted by the rapid pace and fragmented nature of modernity. Hollywood's spatial stories gave expression to both these utopian and dystopian impulses, seeking to reconcile them through a more totaling account of the city. Though our contemporary relationships to the city are dramatically different from those that shaped these earlier spatial stories, the genre conventions that emerged during this important transitional period continue to exert a powerful influence over subsequent representations. Contemporary artists give new form to their perceptions of urban life, but often, they do so in dialogue with these earlier representations. They quote them, as Allen does in Manhattan when he evokes a succession of classic photographs representing the New York skyline, or they rewrite them, as we will see in the example of Dark City, which merges the visual vocabulary of the film noir tradition with more contemporary science fiction trappings. For those reasons, any attempt to understand the contemporary cinematic city must always position those representations in relation to earlier images. PANORAMIC PERSPECTIVES Margaret Cohen has argued that the cinema's synthesizing function was prefigured by a 19th century French genre of popular writings, which she calls "Panoramic Literature." Rather than telling a single story about fictional characters and their experiences, such works sought to tell the collective story of the city. Panoramic works create a composite account which combines written descriptions and narratives with various graphic representations, including maps, charts, cartoons, etchings, and photographs. Panoramic literature sought to record and classify all aspects of everyday experience. Cohen notes, "Panoramic texts evince a characteristic narrational mode: They are composed of micro-narratives with no direct continuity from plot to plot." Often, panoramic works had multiple authors, each writing in different genres with different styles and tones. The cinema absorbed many of these panoramic impulses, constructing a moving record of everyday life. Many early films were literally panoramas, offering views out the windows of streetcars, views pointing into busy intersections, views looking off rooftops. These films encourage a pleasure in scanning the image and observing ordinary interactions. An evening's entertainment at the movies, which might be composed of short comedies, dramas, documentaries, travel films, and the like, was itself a composite picture of turn-of-the-century life, though gradually, the feature film with its classically constructed narrative replaced "the cinema of attractions". Some later American films still adopted this panoramic structure, bringing together stories by multiple authors through some unifying structure based on thematic associations or movements through space. Tales of Manhattan (Julian Duvivier, 1942) uses the improbable circulation of a dress coat to link a series of short stories by some of the period's top screenwriters (including Ben Hect, Donald Ogden Stewart, Alan Campbell, and Lamar Trotti). The coat takes us from the arts world (worn by Charles Laughton as a struggling concert conductor or Charles Boyer as a successful Broadway star) to the shanty town inhabited by a group of black sharecroppers. The stories range from the broadly comic (W.C. Fields as a charlatan temperance lecturer) to the tragic (Edgar G. Robinson as a down-and-out man who dresses up to attend his college reunion). From the 110th Floor: Of course, the use of the term, panoramic, is misleading. These works were less panoramas than collages, composite pictures taken from multiple perspectives in which each element maintains some degree of separation from the others. Such works value diversity rather than coherence. A panorama, on the other hand, creates a totalizing perspective that integrates a wide array of elements into a single vista. What often gets lost in a panorama is the particularity of individual experiences. In his essay, "Walking in the City," Michel De Certeau describes the experience of observing Manhattan from atop the World Trade Center. New York City unfolds around him like a panorama. His vantage point flattens the city into geometric patterns devoid of human activity:
De Certeau is fascinated with the false sense of totality ("seeing the whole") created by this panoramic perspective: "To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city's grasp." We build our modern towers of Babel not to reach the sun, he suggests, but rather to see and know the urban world below us. One of the ways that this desire is fed is through the production and circulation of picture postcards which reproduce this "celestial" view of the city and make it available to many who have never visited the top of the World Trade Center. Architectural critic Alvin Boyarsky has examined picture post cards as a conventional system for representing urban life, suggesting that they adopt a pictorial vocabulary that has remained relatively unchanged for more than sixty years and that varies only minimally from city to city. The postcard embraces an ideology of urban progress, celebrating the man-built environment. Each postcard offers an emblematic image of the city, encapsulating the visit and allowing its transmission to those back home. The postcard, thus, depends on monumentalism, translating the cluttered urban environment into "sights" that can be isolated and recorded, dropped in the mail or plastered in scrapbooks. The most characteristic vantage points on New York City include civic landmarks photographed from a low-angle position, the skyline itself viewed from a boat in the harbor or across one of the bridges, or the aerial perspective looking down on the city streets. The focus is mostly on architecture, not people (except as parts of crowds). The art of the cinema is not the art of the postcard. Cinema's focus is on movement, juxtaposition, and narrative, not static, emblematic, or monumental images. The cinema can not remain in the clouds, if it wants to tell the stories of those who walk below. Yet, the opening montage in Manhattan draws liberally on the postcard's visual repertoire. Allen situates his actors against the backdrops of familiar New York landmarks -- Diane Keaton and Woody Allen watch the sunrise over the Brooklyn Bridge; they have a spat amid the planetarium's alien moonscape. A more complex play between "celestial" and more earthly perspectives can be found in Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise's West Side Story (1961),one of the first Hollywood musicals to make extensive use of location shooting. The film opens with a sequence of spectacular helicopter views looking down on the island of Manhattan. From such heights, we can see cars and buildings, but no people. However, we hear faint echoes of whistling and snapping fingers. A series of shots brings the camera closer to the ground to show us a group of teenagers loitering in a vacant lot. The scale of the film has shifted. We are now on ground level, inhabiting turf contested by the Jets and the Sharks. The camera toys with the spectator, making dramatic shifts in shot scale, swish panning from location to location, often racking focus or zooming out mid-shot to show unanticipated aspects of the image. The moment one side dominates a shot, suddenly the other appears from off-camera, moving in from the left and the right, or even from above and below the original framing and the power dynamic shifts. In a few moments, the film maker moves us from the skies to the streets and it is this shift that enables the story to begin. The shift also represents a move from a "unified" conception of the city to one that sees the urban sidewalks as a space being actively contested between recent immigrants and longer-term residents, one segregated by race, class, gender and nationality as well as a set of borderlands where different communities come together. From the Sidewalk: West Side Story prefigures De Certeau's own shift in focus. If the viewer standing atop the World Trade Center remains "alien" to the inhabited world below, those who walk the streets become active participants. Though individually "illegible," the aggregate of many such movements constitutes the story of urban life:
Such uncoordinated movements, De Certeau argues, can not be adequately expressed through abstractions, whether those of the artist or the urban planner:
De Certeau argues for a sociology that respects these "singularities" rather than searching for a totaling account. The opening of Charles Lane's Sidewalk Stories (1989) explores these "qualitative" differences in ways of moving through the city, representing Manhattan from a pedestrian's perspective. An initial montage shows the morning migrations of urban office workers, a mass of people pushing their way down the sidewalk, pouring out of the subway or waving frantically for taxi cabs. Three men arrive at the same cab seconds apart. They each grab at the door and try to push the others away. When one of them gets into the back seat, the others seize him by his legs and yank him out again. The rapid cutting between different images and the monumental music express the stress and tension of rush hour traffic. Here, Lane self-consciously echoes a justly famous montage sequence from Charles Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), which compared the crowds shoving onto the subway to a flock of sheep being herded into the stockyards. The rhythms of Lane's cutting and music shift as we pick up the trajectory of an aged street person pushing a shopping cart full of belongings. The takes become longer, preserving the slower pace of his footsteps. Deep-focus compositions position him against other unfolding narratives, as he moves past bodies sleeping on the streets and people rummaging through trash cans. Our eye strays to observe a series of street performers, lingering long enough to appreciate their acts, before the tracking shot takes us a little further through Washington Square. In each case, the music shifts tone and genre to reflect the performers' individual sensibilities. Lane constructs a powerful class-based contrast between the urban environment as experienced by those who move with purpose and those who wander because they have no home and no job. As De Certeau suggests, the pedestrian's movements are unpredictable and shadowy, following no fixed trajectory, indifferent to the intended flow of traffic or the desired use of space. "To walk," De Certeau suggests, "is to lack a place." Lane builds his contemporary silent comedy, in the tradition of Chaplin, around such local acts of appropriation and disruption, seeing the homeless as the protagonists of their own stories living in the "shadows" of the great public drama of work life. From a Lower Balcony: Between the streets and the skies, there are many other perspectives, which offer a middle ground between alien abstraction and intimate involvement. The choice de Certeau poses for us, between "voyeurs and walkers" is, in some sense, a false one, though as we will see, middle level generalizations are often difficult to convert into spatial stories. In "Seen From the Window," Henri Lefebvre describes what he observes from his lower balcony. Lefebvre's perch is much closer to the street than De Certeau's, allowing him some distance from individual pedestrians and yet enabling him to focus on the rhythms and patterns of collective movement. He has not lost touch with human scale, experiencing the city not as a static spectacle but as a series of intersecting narratives. From the opening paragraphs, LeFebvre is interested in the process of perception and interpretation:
He wants to document different durations of time, ranging from the intervals between green and red lights to the cyclical shifts from morning to night, as they influence the activity in the streets. LeFebvre's essay ends with the suggestion that the rhythms of the city are "much more varied than in music"; "no camera, no image or sequence of images can show these rhythms. One needs equally attentive eyes and ears, a head, a memory, a heart." LeFebvre sees perception and interpretation as active processes that can not be readily separated from their contexts. A similar fascination sparked a genre of documentary films known as "City Symphonies." As that designation suggests, the central metaphors running through Manhattan (Paul Strand, 1921), Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttman, 1927), or Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) are musical; these films orchestrate the rhythms of urban experience. Often, like LeFebvre, these film makers were fascinated with the cyclical quality of a day in the life of a great city, starting at dawn and ending after dark, showing patterns of collective movement often invisible to individuals focused only on personal goals and activities. Empty streets come to life, fill with people, and then empty again at the end of the day. Berlin and the other city symphonies represent collective patterns of work, eating, recreation, and rest, built up from single images which themselves express individual or particularized experiences. These images purposely cut across class distinctions, bring together many different occupational groups, mix and match men and women. Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1983) is a contemporary city symphony, set to Philip Glass's minimalist music. Koyaanisqatsi contrasts the gradual rhythms of the natural world with the frantic pace of modernity, seeing urban life as "crazy life...life in turmoil...life out of balance... life disintegrating." Reggio uses stop-motion photography to accelerate the action. A huge pile of newspapers evaporates in a matter of seconds. Subways become hives of insects as mobs of people flit from place to place. The flow of traffic becomes a throbbing pattern of light surging through urban arteries. Strategic juxtapositions create a succession of analogies between the population flow along crowded sidewalks and the flow of hot-dogs down a conveyer belt. Its pixilated images involve a play with perception as we struggle to focus on individuals, to sort out specific actions from the pulsating rhythms of the mass. Periodically, Reggio slows down the motion to offer portraits of individuals, looking like squirrels caught in headlights. In the film's final moments, the shot of a city taken from outer space is compared with the microscopic surface of a computer circuit, each indecipherable and yet clearly structured. The film wants us to perceive this acceleration of modern perceptual experience as horrific. Yet, there is a haunting beauty about Reggio's images, such as a giant moon flowing rapidly across the nighttime sky or the glistening lights of cars whizzing along the freeway. We are fascinated by the city's ordered but relentless rhythms. From the Pages of a Guidebook: City symphonies existed on the fringes of the narrative cinema. Their abstraction from individual human experience meant that they did not fit comfortably within the character-centered storytelling associated with the Classical Hollywood Cinema. How do we move from large scale structures focused on collective activity to more personal stories that still express something of the complexity and heterogeneity of urban life? One common structure for spatial stories centers around the tour. Looking at the city through a visitor's eyes helps us to recognize distinguishing characteristics that we ignore in our daily lives. We underestimate the cities where we live, never able to see them with the wonderment that bring tourists to see the sights. One function of spatial stories is to transform the city from a mundane space into a fantastic one, but the tour structure carries its own dangers. Tour guides lead us around by the nose and often do not leave us open to spontaneous discoveries or personal experiences. They prescribe where we should look and what we will see. They reduce the city to its landmarks. "What can happen in one day," a construction worker asks the trio of sailor boys on leave in On The Town (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1949) and as if to answer that question, the next number, "New York, New York," compresses an entire tour of the city into a three minute segment. Each shot shows a different location and a different mode of transportation, as the boys race each other across the Brooklyn Bridge, ride horse drawn carriages, take the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, point at the sites through the roof of taxi cabs, take the subway, gallop on horseback, whiz by on bikes. As the story unfolds, we learn that Chip (Frank Sinatra), who has never been anywhere but Peoria, has structured the whole day -- in fifteen minute increments - according to his grandfather's 1905 guidebook. The guidebook represents one way of organizing the eclectic experiences of the Metropolis, designating a series of sights worthy of particular notice (because, as De Certeau suggests, they are "believable," "memorable," or "primitive") and structuring a route between them that lends coherence and purpose to the day. The guidebook fails Chip in two important ways. First, it does not capture the protean quality of the city. Many of the landmarks he hopes to see -- the Hippodrome, the Floradora Girls -- have been displaced by more contemporary attractions. As the female taxicab driver explains, "A big city changes all the time." Instead, she offers him "the one thing that doesn't change" -- the experience of love and romance. He wants to see the Flatiron Building and she wants to get him back to her place. And this suggests the other way that the guidebook fails him -- displacing the personal, particularized narratives of individuals with totalizing, abstracted representations of the city. In disgust, she protests in a later scene, "whisper sweet nothings in my ear like the population of the Bronx or how many hot-dogs were sold in the last fiscal year at Yankee Stadium." Only when Chip tosses his dated guidebook off the ledge of the Empire State Building does he enjoy Manhattan's real pleasures. Long before Chip rejects his guidebook, On the Town abandons his itinerary for another route through New York City -- one determined by Gabey (Gene Kelly) and his search for the girl of his dreams. The musical maps the city's heterogeneity onto the composite figure of "Miss Turnstiles," this month's poster girl for the subway system: "She's a home loving girl but she loves high society's whirl. She loves the army but her heart belongs to the navy. She's studying painting at the museum and dancing at Symphonic Hall." And she has the one trait that allows her to perfectly personify Manhattan -- she wasn't born there. In fact, she comes from Gabey's own hometown, Meadowville. Despite his friends' constant claims that it is impossible to find one girl among the multitudes, Gabey keeps running into and losing her again and his pursuit takes him through the city's museums, concert halls, high rises, and nightclubs. Here, the shared experience of the guidebook tour gives way to the particularized goal of the search. Both offer the potential stories which center around movements through space but one focuses on the individual experience while the other foregrounds the collective. Both depend on the act of looking: one an act of looking at, the other an act of looking for. From the Countryside: Not surprisingly, a large percentage of Hollywood's spatial stories center around visitors who come to the city from regional cities like Peoria, small towns like Meadowville (On the Town), Mapletown (The Clock) or Glenwood Falls (The Out-of-Towners) or from the countryside. Often, such films build a thematic opposition between town and city which is closely modeled on Ferdinand Tonnies's classic distinction between Gemeinschaft (Community) and Gesellschaft (Society). Phillip Kasinitz provides a useful summary of these concepts:
These differences surface especially powerfully in the silent cinema, when the American people were still adjusting to the new centrality of urban life to their national culture. Such a distinction structures, for example, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927). A woman from the city comes to the country on vacation and destabilizes the relationship between a farmer and his wife. The city woman is depicted as operating outside the shared moral norms of the rural community. She has little respect for the institutions that hold the community together. She is soon the subject of gossip, one of the mechanisms which Tonnies argues help to enforce the stability of the Gemeinschaft by creating sanctions against the violation of its norms. The seductive and socially fragmenting force of the city is vividly represented in one of the film's key moments as the city woman urges the farmer to murder his wife and run away with her. She writhes in her slinky black dress as she describes to him the temptations and sensations of the city and images of urban nightlife (city skylines, bright lights, jazz bands) appear behind her almost as if they were projected onto a movie screen. Murnau uses camera movements, superimposition, and layered images to convey something of the heterogeneity, intensity, and fragmentation of the Gesellschaft. The farmer's wife, by contrast, is a plain, simple woman who loves her husband and remains faithful to him, despite his infidelities. When she visits the city, she is drawn towards simple pleasures, such as watching the church wedding of a young couple or getting a photograph taken with her spouse. She is suspicious of the easy, informal social relations of the city, anxiously eyeing the manicurist who trims her husband's nails. The city is full of threats and seductions that can destroy a marriage; they both are eager to return home to the country. The story is a familiar one -- the farm couple comes to the city, takes in its sights, and then returns back home where they belong. In Neil Simon's The Out-of-Towners (1970), George (Jack Lemmon), a small town businessman, comes to New York City with his wife, Glen (Sandy Dennis) for a job interview. George and Glen have big plans for how they will enjoy their night on the town, but all of their plans go awry. Before the night is over, George and Glen stand, shivering, starving, and desperate, in a New York Police Station. "We were in a hold-up. We might have been killed," Glen proclaims, but they have great difficulty holding the attention of the police officer on duty. The sanitation strike which has left the city piled high with garbage has at last been settled, they are told, but now the milkmen have gone out. A horde of people all press towards the desk, each with their own stories of crime, woe, and distress, each interrupting with their own demands for resolution and assistance. Gwen is herself distracted, worrying about everyone's problems but her own: "I know what you're going through," she explains, which is, of course, literally true. George and Gwen's troubles stem from their assumption that their experiences matter when the city operates on the basis of statistics, not individuals. One missed train, one lost piece of luggage, one mislaid hotel reservation, one stolen wallet, one important business transaction amount to little. There are too many people, too many problems, for city services to respond to any of them. And, George can only react by trying to order the events by preparing for a law suit, taking down names, making a list of grievances, as if the whole experience were one great conspiracy against him. He screams to the skies, "You're just a city. Well, I'm a person and a person is stronger than a city. You're not getting away with anything. I have all your names and addresses." In the end, the couple finds they have no place in the city and they go back home to the Midwest, a region with a stronger sense of human proportion. On a Street Corner: Gemeinschaft, as Tonnes describes it, has many of the familiar features of a classically constructed narrative -- a unity of time and place, a consistency of viewpoint, a shared goal, a relatively limited cast of characters. In fact, to illustrate the social relations that arise in such a culture, Tonnes constantly evokes plots that have long been building blocks of the western storytelling tradition -- stories of the relationship between generations, between father and son, between siblings, between husbands and wives, between neighbors. In such a world, relationships are defined through their continuity and reciprocity, the intensity and permanence of the emotional investments we make in other community members. Relationships within a Gesellschaft culture, on the other hand, are "transitory and superficial"; people have many more social encounters in such a world but they do not cohere into a consistent narrative, because they do not demand the same emotional investments and thus do not leave lasting imprints. Street Scene (King Vidor, 1931), which is based on a stage play by Elmer Rice, was a bold experiment in narrative form because it attempts to create a plot structure appropriate for a Gesselschaft culture. Set on a tenement block, the film's opening scenes have little or no consistent focus. Children play in the streets. Neighbors linger on their stoops, shout from window to window, come and go along the sidewalks. Their conversation shifts from topic to topic. They get into arguments that reflect their conflicting moral codes. Vidor captures the seeming randomness of Rice's plot with fluid camera movements that sweep the space, following dialogue from window to window, or tracking down the street with one character and then pivoting and tracking back with another.[fig.10] Within these early scenes, there are many potential plots -- a woman cheating on her husband, a young couple awaiting a birth, a family about to be evicted because they can no longer pay their bills, a sister worried about her brother. In one shot, the camera pans across adjacent windows that reveal residents shaving, dressing, stretching and exercising, bouncing their babies, hanging the laundry, applying make-up. Each neighbor seems totally unself-conscious about the close proximity of the others. Only late in the film does a single plotline dominate: a husband returns home unexpectedly and catches his wife in the arms of her lover; he murders her and the entire community is drawn into the investigation and its aftermath. Street Scene signals its sudden shift in plot structure by altering its editing style -- from long-takes and camera movements to close-ups and rapid editing. A succession of reaction shots show the startled and alarmed people as they witness the acts of violence or run down the street to see what has happened. Then, finally, the camera pulls back to show the entire city block mobbed with people. The multiplicity of urban life coheres into a narrative only when disaster occurs. Even then, coherence is provisional. Soon, attention will be drawn elsewhere. Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) could almost be understood as an attempt to update Street Scene. Rice and Vidor documented the cultural conflicts that arose within a multicultural neighborhood as waves of immigration were changing the character of life on the Lower East Side. Street Scene's Jews, Italians, Irish, and Swedes watch each other with suspicion, debate religious and social values, hurl ethnic slurs, but somehow co-exist on the same block. They constitute a community, despite their differences. Do the Right Thing is about the uneasy compromises that enable life to continue in a multiracial Bed-Stuy neighborhood. Through a series of vividly drawn vignettes, Spike Lee moves us beyond sociological generalizations to more directly experience the emotional investments various characters make in having their own "place" in this evolving community. Who speaks for this community? The hot-tempered "Buggin' Out," the sputtering Smiley with his photocopied images of great black leaders, the dignified but drunk "mayor," the fast-talking disc-jockey Senior Love Daddy, the wise crone Mother Sister, or the pragmatic and unreliable Mookie? Each has a chance to articulate Bed-Stuy's values, but Spike Lee offers us little way of reconciling their contradictory assumptions. The neighborhood seems constantly on the verge of racial conflict, as Sal's son resents having to work on "the planet of the apes," Buggin' Out demands that there should be pictures of "brothers" on the restaurant's wall of fame, the old black men who sit on the street corner sputter with rage over Korean immigrants buying up business in their neighborhood, Radio Rasheim's rapping Boombox tries to drown out his Hispanic neighbor's salsa, and the locals feud with a Celtics supporter who has invested in an old "brownstone" on their block. At one dramatic moment, the story stops altogether as Lee shows us one character after another hurling racial epithets directly into the camera in a montage sequence that traces the cycle of hate and bigotry. As individuals, these people can form friendships, make moral and personal distinctions, find ways to relate to each other, even parent children together. But, as representatives of their own racial communities, they can only fight for space and seethe over historic injustices. Lee's film, no less than Street Scene, depends upon a nostalgia for an organic community whose ties extend across generations and beyond cultural boundaries. Sal evokes such a vision of Bed-Stuy when he describes the experience of owning his own restaurant there for decades: "I watch the little kids grow old and the old people grow older...They grow up on my food." Lee calls attention to the affection that Sal has for Mookie and his sister and the friendship between Mookie and Sal's younger son. He depicts Sal as someone who has learned to compromise to avoid conflict and who respects the hierarchy of the community. Yet, Lee has little faith that these kinds of sentimental attachments can transcend society-wide racial conflicts, which are evoked moments later by a shot of graffiti scrawled on the side of the wall, "Tawana told the truth," or by the images of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King that Smiley peddles in the street. When violence erupts, the incidents are pulled into the history of police brutality against black defendants. There is an eerie familiarity to the moment when the firemen turn their hoses off the blaze and direct them against the community members who have gathered to watch Sal's place burn to the ground. No less than Rice and Vidor, Lee wants to use this street corner society as a microcosm to speak about the larger history of urban America. Much as in Street Scene, the opening moments of Do The Right Thing are episodic, with their focus shifting from one vivid character to another, until we know our way around Lee's fully drawn and richly populated milieu. And much like Street Scene, the film builds towards a moment of violence when all of the various characters and their stories come together. The violence in Street Scene was personal -- a jealous husband murders his wife -- though in the tightly-woven communities of the Lower East Side, it is impossible to extract oneself fully from your neighbor's business. The violence in Do the Right Thing is collective and political. No one can remain neutral, as becomes clear as the spiritual Mother Sister shouts for her neighbors to "burn it down" and then, moment later, cries with horror at the destruction that has been unleashed. In the end, personal loyalties matter little. Mookie, who Sal described as "a son," smashes a trash can through the pizzeria window. But, racial loyalties are of vital importance; the Korean grocer shouts over and over, "I no white. You, Me, the Same," trying to close ranks against the Italians while preserving his own precarious status in the neighborhood. All social ties are temporary, unstable. The story of the city is being re-negotiated along the borderlands where different racial groups come together or break apart. At the Train Station: Train stations are narrative nexuses where paths cross and new relationships are formed. What happens within such spaces depends heavily upon chance, upon the random ebb and flow of urban traffic. People are brought together and they are separated. Yet, in the hands of an artist, such flux can become meaningful. The risk, of course, is that the characters will be swamped by the bustle surrounding them. A train pulls into Penn Station at the opening of Vincente Minelli's The Clock (1945) and a mob of people disembark. Among them is Joe (Robert Walker), a serviceman on leave. When he stops beside an escalator to read his newspaper, Alice (Judy Garland), an attractive office worker, trips over him and breaks the heel of her shoe. They meet and fall in love. Later, the couple gets separated at Grand Central Station. Pushing through an indifferent mob, Alice gets on a subway train and Joe doesn't. They still don't know each other's names and have no way of finding each other again. When Alice seeks advice at the local USO club or when Joe asks a newspaper stand owner whether he saw a girl get off a train, they are met with incredulousness: "I see a thousand girls get off trains." All girls look alike to the man who sells the papers; but only one girl will do for the soldier in love. Yet, despite all the odds, they do find each again and the closing moments of the film bring them back to Penn Station once more - now a young married couple separating for the first time. The camera pans slowly past the people awaiting their trains. A father clutches his newborn baby. Elderly mothers hold onto their servicemen sons. A husband discusses last minute details of family business. An old officer bids farewell to his wife, a young black man to his father, and young lovers kiss one last time. But, in each cluster, there is at least one person who is serving his country and all of them are saying goodbye. What brings the young lovers together again is not so much chance as predestination. From its beginnings, the classical Hollywood cinema was suspicious of the arbitrariness of chance and coincidence. Ideally, its stories were structured around well-motivated causal event-chains. Conventions mandated that each event should be linked, logically and inextricably to all those that come before and all of those that follow it. In romantic comedy, however, causality often gives way to predestination. Some couples are made for each other and will be united, one way or another. The more daunting the obstacles in True Love's path, the more inevitable the coupling seems. Consequently, the city becomes the ideal setting for romantic comedy - one that translates chance encounters into inevitable romances, provides appropriate backdrops for courtship, and contrasts the intimacy between the lovers with the alienation of urban culture. Though the enormity of Manhattan constantly threatens to engulf them, their love story stands out against the hurried backdrop of New York's various terminals. But this "city of strangers" can just as readily lend itself to erotic nightmares. In Martin Scorsese's black comedy, After Hours (1985), a young adventurer encounters a mysterious woman at an all-night Laundromat and gets pulled into her story, venturing into Soho during the wee hours of the morning. However, nothing coheres or makes much sense in this farce about contemporary urban alienation. As one character warns him, "different rules apply when it gets this late." A series of random encounters with eccentric women strips him step by step of all the trappings of his identity - his wallet, his car keys, his clothing, even his hair (punk rockers threaten to give him a Mohawk). An emblem of the role of happenstance in the film, the twenty dollar bill he is clutching blows out the window of the fast-moving cab leaving him no way to pay his tab and no way to get back home. Later in the film, the bill ends up plastered onto a sculpture he encounters in his ramblings. Everything seems connected to everything else, but not in predictable ways. Everything that happens is subject to multiple interpretations and our protagonist usually misunderstands what is happening to him. He spots a group of Hispanic men struggling with a television set, which he assumes must be stolen. When he screams, they drop it and run away, which convinces him that he has foiled a crime in progress. It turns out that both men are normally criminals but they have actually bought this set: "See what happens when you pay for stuff." As the night unfolds, he finds himself under suspicion for local break-ins, chased through the streets by an angry mob. An artist's sketch of his face is plastered on every telephone post. Robbed of his identity, he has no way to free himself from their unjust suspicions. Lost in a strange neighborhood, he has no friends or families he can draw upon for support or assistance. Through the Rear-View Mirror: Hollywood's spatial stories repeatedly tell us that we are a product of the spaces we inhabit. As we move through the city, we do not remain separate from it; the city becomes a part of us, alters our behavior, redefines our identities. In Taxi Driver (1976), Travis Bickle's eyes pear intently into the rear view mirror. Rain splatters on the windshield and the wipers swish it away. The street outside is a neon blur. Red and blue flashing lights illuminate the human figures that bob in slow motion along steamy streets. And the taxi cab scurries about the city, picking up passengers and dropping them off. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver risks incoherence in trying to tell the story of a man who sees everything and understands little, who is constantly in movement and yet moves without purpose. "I go all over," he tells us, "It doesn't make any difference to me." The world as seen from the mirror of Bickle's cab is a lonely place full of lonely people, and he holds it in horror and contempt: "All of the animals come out at night..." He imagines the approaching apocalypse: "Some day a real rain will come and wash the scum off the streets." Bickle becomes, in Scorsese's film, the personification of New York - sometimes romantic, sometimes brutally violent. Bickle embodies the random events and unstable social relations of urban culture, constantly shifting his goals and tactics. The parts only come together retrospectively, when his violent impulses are redirected from his plans to assassinate a presidential candidate and towards the task of rescuing a young prostitute. He shoots his way into the brothel, leaving a path of bloody bodies, sitting in a dazed and confused state until the police arrive to take him away. None of this makes any sense. For the newspapers, however, Bickle has become a hero. The eyes of New York are upon him. By the film's closing images, all of coherence has broken down into a fragmented, almost cubist image, which recalls the stylized and subjective representations of New York that Frank Stella created in the 1920s and 1930s. We see the world partly through his front windshield, partially through his rearview mirror. The scene is almost abstract, flashes of light and color that sometimes take shape into something we recognize, but more often remain blurry and indistinct. Anticlimax: Hollywood's spatial stories struggle to balance their utopian and dystopian conceptions of the city, their belief in urban progress and their anxiety about the collapse of old social institutions. The film artists try to reconcile their focus on the totality of the urban environment and their fascination with the complex interplay between multiple experiences. Such tensions run through our attempts to theorize the city and to give it aesthetic form. The forces shaping urban experience are complex, multidirectional, transient, and often totally invisible. Nevertheless, we imagine urban life as controlled by secret societies, hidden forces, conspiracies, smoke-filled rooms. The current popularity of conspiracy theories in popular culture suggests our compelling need to personify the governing forces behind urban life and our fear that they may not be directly observed or readily mapped. Dark City (Alex Prokas, 1997) offers a noir-ish vision of the postmodern city, depicting urban space as an incomprehensible maze. The city is mutating before our eyes. Nothing remains the same; nothing matters. Yet, Prokas suggests, the city follows a secret logic; its citizens are manipulated by hidden forces. The Dark City is not New York, not any place in particular. It has been, we have been told, "fashioned on stolen memories, different eras, different pasts, all rolled into one." Dark City makes stunning use of morphing to literally restructure the city before our eyes. We watch new buildings rise from the concrete. Old buildings grow window ledges, expand into domes. While the city sleeps, dark hooded figures creep among us, changing our clothes, imprinting new memories, moving us from place to place, so that when we awake we are enmeshed in a different life, become part of an alternative narrative. Our memories are distilled, "mixed like paints," and then re-injected into us, offering no reliable way of understanding who we are and what is happening to us. As one of the characters explains, "They steal people's memories and swap them between us -- back and forth, back and forth -- until nobody knows who he is anymore." The protagonist awakens, naked and without any memories, conscious while others sleep, observing but not fully comprehending other people's behavior as he pears through their windows. His search for an explanation is mirrored by the detectives and their serial murder investigation (which may or may not lead back to him). In a classic noir, the detective was a lone individual who understood better than anyone else the code of the city. His search for truth promised to untangle the web of relationships that link the story's various characters. In the neo-noir Dark City, the detectives do not have a clue; they have no hope of finding answers. One detective has been driven mad by the complexity of this city, scrawling endless spirals and scribbling cryptic words on his apartment walls. "I've been spending time in the subway, riding in circles, thinking in circles. There's no way out. I've been over every inch of the city." Though he never understands what he has discovered, his circles do contain the pattern that holds all of this together, linking an early shot of rats being run through a circular maze with the great clock which controls the waking and sleeping of the citizens and with our final image of the city -- a spiral of skyscrapers arranging on a flat surface floating in the vast emptiness of space. But there is a conspiratorial logic here. The city is controlled by the Strangers, who personify de Certeau's "alien" or "celestial" perspective. They are hooded figures with featureless faces and bald heads; they are interchangeable, sharing a collective memory. They are the very embodiment of urban experience as a totality, of a deterministic logic that allows little or no room for particular experience. Through a process of experimentation, they hope to understand the individuality that makes us human. They are the ones who move the hands of the clock, who set the rhythms of urban experience. If there is, in the end, a story of the city, they are its authors and its architects. They, alone, enjoy absolute mobility -- they dwell in secret places underneath the city; they can walk among us without being seen; they can hover over the city streets peering down at the pedestrians. Dark City, thus, uses the struggle against the Strangers to personify the core conflicts that have run through this essay -- the conflict between abstraction and particularity, between the city understood as a totality or as heterogeneity, between the urban environment experienced as ordered or as random and chaotic. What this paper has described is the struggle to give shape and form to urban experience, to find its rhythms, map its labyrinthian streets, record its protean activities, and give it an cohesive identity. This project has inspired -- and arguably, defeated - the imagination of America's greatest filmmakers. The story of the city can't be told - at least not as a totality. There is no structure, no coherence, only simultaneous activities, people walking down sidewalks, pushing their way onto subway trains, standing in their windows, waiting impatiently at police stations, wandering aimlessly through museums, pursuing their own particular paths without regard to each other. There is no single vision which can express and contain our complex and contradictory feelings towards the American metropolis. There are only ways of seeing, only provisional vantage points which offer a succession of near perfect images of urban life. Kevin Lynch arrived at almost the same place. There is a curious passage near the end of The Image of The City where Lynch tries to imagine an alternative form that might preserve his own sense of the multiplicity of urban meanings and experiences while achieving the legibility and clarity that was central to his aesthetic conception of the city. For a few paragraphs, Lynch imagines the city as given ideal expression in a multilinear and polysequential form. Though Lynch would not have had access to the analogy in 1959, Lynch imagines something akin to hypertext:
Lynch seems to suggest that the city itself might be structured as a hypertext, but suppose that the hypertext gave us a more perfect representation of the city precisely because it was multilinear and interactive. Suppose a future artist were to construct such a hypertext, one in which the four million stories that O. Henry imagined in New York City were all recorded, and viewers could traverse each narrative and observe their points of intersection and digression. Suppose we could represent at once the abstract patterns of movement and the particular journeys, searches, and tours that motivated individual experience. Suppose the structuring elements of this hypertext were Lynch's various paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks, the features around which so many spatial stories arise and play themselves out. Suppose this artist were to construct the perfect model of the urban experience, one that was truly totalizing in its perspective. Could we as spectators comprehend such a story? Would we have time or the interest to experience the complex interweavings of its various plot strands? Could we feel its rhythms and witness the unfolding of random chance, romantic predestination, and urban indifference? Could we stand over the sum total of human experience as if it were a panorama or a picture postcard? This would be a truly celestial --and inhuman -- perspective. |
