Fran Lebowitz lives a life of contradictions. She’s a public intellectual who never graduated high school, a queer icon who never formally came out, a quintessential New Yorker who grew up in New Jersey, and most famously, a writer who doesn’t write. In recent months, she’s added a new item to that list: she does not maintain even a nominal social media presence but still managed to go viral. This accomplishment surely means nothing to Lebowitz herself, who often boasts of such a severe aversion to technology that she doesn’t own a microwave oven, but even her own Luddism couldn’t stop a clip from Public Speaking, the feature-length documentary Martin Scorsese made about her for HBO in 2010, from garnering attention on Twitter this past December.
The two-minute excerpt features Lebowitz describing the effects the AIDS crisis had on New York City’s artistic communities in the 1980s, including not only the loss of great artists, writers, dancers, and so on, but also the mass extinction of the audience for those arts: “A very discerning audience, an audience with a high level of connoisseurship, is exactly as important to the culture as artists,” she says. “When that audience died, and that audience died in five minutes, I mean, literally, people didn’t die faster in a war, it allowed the second, third, fourth tier to rise to the front of the line, because the people who died of AIDS were the people who, I don’t know how to put this, got laid a lot. Now, imagine who didn’t get AIDS. That’s who’s now lauded as the great artist… If all the people who died came back to life and I told them ‘Guess who’s a big star,’ they would fall on the floor!”
It’s a phenomenal insight, one that both describes the cultural conditions necessary in order for art to thrive and addresses the ways LGBTQ communities are often inexorably bound up in those conditions. It also captures Lebowitz at her absolute best: wholly original, fundamentally humanist, exceptionally grounded, and still with room to land a punchline at the end of the chunk.
Pretend It’s a City, the new Netflix documentary series that once again features Lebowitz in conversation with Scorsese and acts as a sort-of sequel to Public Speaking, does not achieve that same level of insight. It’s longer—the cumulative running time stretches three and a half hours across seven episodes—but somehow narrower in scope, with Scorsese turning Lebowitz’ gaze away from the culture at large and limiting it to the mundane details of New York life. Trivial complaints about apartment hunting largely replace the nuanced observations to which we became accustomed in Public Speaking (though there are occasional detours through bigger picture topics like the #MeToo Movement). Of course, the series isn’t without its bright spots. It’s livelier and more scenic than Public Speaking, which consisted almost entirely of close-ups of Fran’s face in the low light of the Waverly Inn. This time around, we follower her and Marty to the Queens Museum, the stacks at the New York Public Library, and other photogenic locales. But either because age has turned Lebowitz more toward the curmudgeonly, or due to the glut of Scorsese’s now supersized approach to his subject, Pretend It’s a City ultimately lacks the vibrant, frenetic atmosphere of Public Speaking, which was packed so densely it made one wonder what other delectable gems were left on the cutting room floor.
Lebowitz herself has enjoyed a life that most writers envy a great deal. She moved to New York in 1969 and soon began writing for magazines, among them, Andy Warhol’s Interview. Her first book, a collection of humor pieces entitled Metropolitan Life, was released in 1978 to critical acclaim and blockbuster-level sales. Social Studies, the follow-up, came around in 1981, and with the exception of a children’s book in 1995 and the odd magazine piece here and there, it would prove to be her final published work. In the years since, she’s made her living on the college lecture circuit, dropping bon mots about contemporary life, taking questions from a moderator or audience members about books, politics, culture: the kinds of topics that animate most good conversations. Through it all—and this is the part that especially makes writers’ mouths water—she’s managed to hover consistently at the edges of the public consciousness without having to publish a single word.
This is no small feat. Most public intellectuals have to at least churn a book out from time to time to remind us why we ought to keep them around, but with Fran, we seem content simply to spend time in her company, which is partly what Pretend It’s a City allows us to do. The trouble is, that’s the most it seems interested in doing. Scorsese seems to have forgotten what made Lebowitz such an excellent documentary subject, and his ideas about her ideas seem only to have softened in the decade since Public Speaking. That documentary began with an anecdote about an art auction in which Fran concluded there is “no more suitable or potent image for our time than that of the blind art collector.” Pretend It’s a City begins with an audience question that tees Fran up for a rant about tourists walking too slowly on the sidewalk. Nowhere is the difference in the level of ambition between the two projects clearer.
In other words, where Public Speaking was a vessel for Fran’s ideas, Pretend It’s a City is a vessel for her sense of humor only. The former was about how fully she committed to her generation’s concept of what it means to be “a New Yorker,” the seeming impossibility that someone so committed would live to tell the tale, and the struggle to keep that spirit alive as the city increasingly prizes money and real estate above all other human values. The latter, meanwhile, has little on its mind beyond, “Aren’t Fran’s jokes about the subway great?”
Whatever your personal answer to that question may be, it was never Fran’s ability to land a punchline that made her so intriguing to me. In Public Speaking, yes, she was funny, but she was funny for a writer. She was funny in the midst of talking about the impact of the AIDS Crisis. She was funny despite taking on a subject as humdrum as the arc of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary career. She was funny while at the same time discussing the ways policy decisions have affected cultural life in New York.
In Pretend It’s a City, she’s just funny. And even that depends on who you ask.