We watched three episodes in one sitting, which was my limit. There's only so much complaining you can listen to before it starts to bring you down. It's ironic but not surprising that the complaints of someone who finds everything annoying would itself become annoying but Lebowitz knows that people find her cantankerous persona grating and she doesn't care. Greg disagreed with me. He felt that each episode was building a deeper understanding of Lebowitz's world view and relationship to New York City, which is true, and he could've happily watched all seven in a row. I stopped him from going any further with his explanation of why he has a tolerance for hours of a woman's non-stop ranting.
Still, I was very taken with Pretend It's a City. Because it's Scorsese, it's about as visually evocative as an interview-heavy series could be. Lebowitz is an excellent storyteller and she has some wonderful anecdotes from her 50 or so years in Manhattan. To me, it's an antidote to binge television. Each episode stands alone - best enjoyed weekly, like television was in the good old days. However, the good old days of New York City is not something Lebowitz acknowledges exists. She's not the curmudgeon who laments the loss of her beloved city as it once was. She's someone who enjoys and has built a career out of humourising the frustrations of living in one of the most visited cities in the world - a city that to Lebowitz has only two constants: change and irritation. She's someone with a lifetime of fascinating stories but she isn't going to waste her time telling them to a moron like you.
HE SAW
Midway through the third episode of Pretend It's a City, I was thinking what a pleasant and unusual experience it is to binge a series like this, when Zanna turned to me and said, "It's not something you really want to binge, is it?"
"Funny you should say," I said, and began to detail the thoughts I'd just been having. At least, I tried to. Almost as soon as I began speaking, I realised I had neither much of a grasp on them nor any real belief in them. As I tried to verbalise my case, I could hear it falling down around me and could see Zanna losing interest in it. I ran out of enthusiasm, and pretty much just let her talk from that point on.
If Pretend It's a City teaches us anything, it's that Fran Lebowitz has never had this problem. The thrill of the show, and its raison d'etre, is watching her mind at work, at high speed, delivering her largely off-the-cuff witticisms and insights, which demonstrate how powerful a mind can be, while simultaneously reminding one how powerful one's isn't.
I might have found that demoralising, but I long ago made peace with the fact there's not much I can do about it. If I'd discovered Lebowitz as a young man, I might have made this peace sooner. In one scene, featuring an audience Q&A at one of her speaking engagements, someone asks her how to acquire a sense of humour. She replies: "The same way you acquire height."
The most interesting question about a mind like Lebowitz's is the fundamental one: What kind of life does it deliver? There are the tangible qualities - fame, adulation, friendship with Scorsese - but how does she feel about life? What goes through her head when she wakes up at 2am and how does she deal with that?
It's hard to know the answers to these questions, because the driving force behind this show and behind Lebowitz's responses to anything she's ever asked, is about humour rather than truth. Her persona is grand curmudgeon/misanthrope but it's hard to know how much of that persona is authentic and how much of it has been constructed to bring her the emotional pay-off of laughter and adulation. It's possible, particularly after decades of performing, there's no difference between the two.
Pretend It's a City is streaming now on Netflix.
