On January 8th, 2021, a new Netflix original series appeared called Pretend it’s a City. It stars a seductive, if not minimal cast: Martin Scorsese in the company of the infamous Fran Leibowitz. Their show is spent discussing the great city of New York over coffees.
New York City has never been without its allure—for all of us Californians and Kansans, and the world at large, really. But, “New York” has become illusory. One doesn’t crop up in downtown to find herself engaged with Allen Ginsburg’s gritty Greenwich Village, does not find herself falling into the company of young Robert Maplethorpes nor Andy Warhols nor, I think, milling about such institutions as the Stonewall Inn or Bemelmans Bar for anything more than a photo-opportunity. It is a waning disposition that New York boasts. It is a withering nostalgia that brand new, sterile glass towers bury.
Pretend it’s a City is fortunate to exhume and rekindle that nostalgia in such figures as Fran and Martin. Fran—the show consists mainly of her dialogue—reeks of “New York.” She is a caricature of herself, a human manifestation of the phrase “I’m walkin’ here!” She can be imagined grumpily admiring the greatest artworks of the city in the most awe-inspiring museums, all with a modest bodega coffee in her hand. She is without cell phone. She takes public transit. She is perpetually perturbed. Her momentum, if you will, lunges forward at a dizzying pace. To desire for old New York is to hang on Fran’s every word, and you’d be something of a traitor to speak your disagreements with her. She is loved and trusted and legendary. She beguiles all in her path: Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Alec Baldwin, Toni Morrison, et al.
Amongst Fran’s bemoaning the decaying subway system or negligent pedestrians or ridiculous ‘wellness’ trends remains her persistent infatuation with the state of womanhood. In one scene, she describes an interaction with a young girl—a child—with whom she had some kind of trivial disagreement.
“You’re just a little girl,” she says to the child.
“I’m a woman,” the child retorts.
This piques Fran’s interest—prompts her to explore a fascination that she has no doubt mulled over exhaustively.
“You’re not a woman,” she says. “Now, of course, you can’t say that to anyone. If someone says ‘I’m a woman,’ you’re a woman! Okay? ” —Scorsese, as he does throughout the show, wheezes with laughter—“You can be a three-year-old girl, a seventy-year-old man, you could be a giraffe…”
A red-flag is raised. Suddenly her old-world sensibility is as akin to smoking on airplanes as it is to the oldest joke in the proverbial book: Men pretending to be ladies.
A pin-prick. One single line, concealed in something of a joke—A seventy-year-old man and a giraffe, for chrissakes! Indeed, it wouldn’t only be traitorous to voice disagreement here, but also nitpicky. Hot-headed. Excessive. Such public figures from Tomi Lahren all the way to Dave Chappelle lean their famed rhetorics against this kind of mountain-making of molehills; the kids these days, the liberals, the snowflakes, they’re so sensitive, so quick to ‘cancel.’ A cut-the-bullshit intellectual of yesteryear such as Fran Leibowitz is the dying breed who calls it like it is: Ridiculous! A damn giraffe. A seventy-year-old man, no doubt covered in hair and square-jawed and shaped like a warrior of patriarchy.
But, it isn’t the first time a red-flag warned of danger much larger than a pin-prick. Whether you were born in 1989 or 2009, the works of author JK Rowling have pervaded your childhood. The success of her Harry Potter books transcends popular literature; it is the movies, the merchandise, the theme-parks, the broadway plays, and the spin-offs that add up to the sum of Rowling’s achievements. For these, she sits upon a throne of one billion dollars. She is one in just over 2,000 people on this Earth called “billionaire,” and in recent years, she has wielded this colossal privilege to fight-the-good-fight. The author (of the famed book about a young outcast battling hegemony and bigotry) simply cannot stand to live in a world with seventy-year-old men claiming to be women.
Rowling and Leibowitz share a common interest in the liberation of women. Leibowitz can’t help but plug her damning life-experience as a woman in a man’s world throughout her Netflix show. Rowling fears that the category of ‘woman’ will altogether vanish if things carry on the way they are. Neither can imagine that the seventy-year-old man calling himself a woman can possibly have achieved the travails of womanhood that so define womanhood as they have known it—it would be akin to a jungle animal insisting it be referred to as a woman. A giraffe in a nightgown. A fantastic beast, indeed.
People like Rowling and Leibowitz don’t represent an isolated or niche faction of this myopic feminism. In fact, Rowling is something of a vanguard to that very ideology, one which vehemently resents the notion that a woman can consist of anything other than a uterus and fallopian tubes—the makings of an insidious pseudo-feminism with roots growing around the world. Consider the 2018 Pride Parade in London which found itself hospitable and welcoming to anti-transgender LGB groups. Consider Tulsi Gabbard’s latest streak of political activism, claiming to protect girl’s rights in schools by banning transgender students from sports.
“Our legislation protects Title IX’s original intent which was based on the general biological distinction between men and women athletes based on sex,” reports Time on a now-deleted statement by Tulsi Gabbard. She says it plainly: “biological distinction.” Nevermind the countless amounts of research and scholarship problematizing her draconian biological distinction—thinking scientifically is something of a meek liberal inclination these days. One needs only common sense, lest she be deemed a ‘snowflake.’
So, is Rowling (and those echoing her beliefs) simply distasteful or is Rowling abominable? We return to the punch-line at hand, the joke prompting this exploration in the first place. The one about seventy-year-old men claiming to be women in the same vein as zebras—or, was it elephants? Throw a stone and one will hit a number of aging comedians dispensing unfriendly punch-lines, who would sooner roll their eyes than change their tune. Quote Jerry Seinfeld in the LA Times after backlash for a homophobic joke: “There’s a creepy P.C. thing out there that really bothers me.” Jerry goes on to call it “P.C. nonsense” and “anti-comedy.” These quotes were published in June of 2015, just a month before Jerry’s transphobic meltdown on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
It really bothers Jerry Seinfeld. What does it do to the implicated party? On September 4th, 2019 the body of Bee Love Slater, a black trans woman, was found immolated beyond recognition in Clewiston, Florida. On June 8th, 2020 the body of Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, a black trans woman, was found in Philadelphia, stabbed to death and with her legs severed clean off. In the early hours of August 17th, 2020 a small group of transgender women were harassed, attacked, and robbed on the street in Hollywood. Onlookers were present, as was apparent in the video recordings, but they did not provide assistance despite cries for help. Later that year, in October, another Angeleno trans woman was attacked and stabbed sixteen times in MacArthur Park.
Neither Jerry Seinfeld nor JK Rowling nor Fran Leibowitz were responsible for these attacks and murders—to say so would be ridiculous. But, the violence present in the lives of transgender people remains so prevalent, so pervasive, so global that there simply isn’t any good humor in those punch-lines which capitalize upon the oppression of the very oppressed. There simply isn’t any good humor in the assailment of the most assailed persons. The punch-line can’t possibly be innocuous because we haven’t yet room for this disparaging the relentlessly disparaged. The punch-line, in Leibowitz’s case, reads crystal clear: You are not a woman because you are a man, and that you would claim otherwise is as necessarily inhuman as though an animal were claiming it.
While watching Pretend it’s a City, one craves oh-so intrinsically to align herself with Fran. One would surrender her affinity for quinoa or yoga in favor of cigarettes or a disdain for technology—it’s the old-world way, it’s true blue, it’s what the real New Yorkers do. It’s common sense. It’s who we all want to be when we visit The Whitney, marvel at the Warhols, while we carry our copies of Just Kids through the West-4th Street station, when we forgive the old-guard fashionistas for their repetitive indiscretions and buy a copy of Anna Wintour’s Vogue. There persists as much desire to appear shrouded in grainy, antiquey 35MM film on Instagram as there persists the desire to think as does Leibowitz, to write as does Sontag, to speak as does Didion, to beguile the Scorsese’s and the Baldwin’s with just how not-bullshit, how attuned to the unadulterated New York sensibility one can possibly be.
Only, this is a pretend city where the punch-lines have not lost their punch. And I do not belong there.