Manhattan Transience and Privilege in

Manhattan Transience and Privilege in Woody Allen's Manhattan New York City is both a frequently glamorized metropolis and a demonized as a Gotham. And quite certainly, both of these characterizations is true. This is the reason for the broad spectrum of identities given to the city in film and given to the experience of enjoying or enduring the experience in its cinematic characters. As a result, the variance of cinematic representations of New York can be attributed at least in part to the experience of the transient spaces of modernity.

Under the thumb of modern industrialization, New York is at once and in close proximity, a place of great opportunity and great struggle. That these cohabitate side-by-side creates a character ripe for cinematic exploration. More than that even, this creates an opportunity for depictions of this transience that trend either toward cultural growth or physical decay depending on the socioeconomic status of the beholder. So is this particularly evidenced in Woody Allen's love-letter to the city of New York, 1979's Manhattan.

Here, Allen is among the privileged and as such, offers a view of New York as a place where constant intellectual vibrancy produces a sense of philosophical inquisitiveness. This contrasts sharply some of the cinematic depictions of New York more directly rooted in the practical struggles of survival. Discussion: In one respect that the text by Berman & Berger identifies, Allen's vantage on New York was a distinct one that simultaneously glorified the cultural vitality of the metropolis while mocking its arrogance, its pomposity and its collective ego.

But in quite another respect, Berman & Berger suggests that Allen's position was one of some opportunity and advantage. While not an uncommon disposition in New York, it does diverge significantly from the experience of struggle that is perhaps more endemic there. And certainly, the variant canon of cinema dedicated to the city reveals a place veritably defined by said struggle for many.

On this point, Berman & Berger assert that the cinematic character of the city may be differentiated into films on the 'Big Apple,' replete with themes of making it big on Broadway or contributing to the next artistic horizon in some important respect, and into films on 'New York City,' a place where opportunity is sought in the face of grit, grime, crime and conflict.

In this regard, the cinematic presentation of New York, Berman & Berger opine, is shaped by the degree of privilege known to the beholder. Their text puts forth the argument that "privilege is what was at stake in Spike Lee's career. This is why his big-screen imaginings of New York City were always more interesting viewing than Woody Allen's Big Apple movies in which privilege was no longer struggled for but taken for granted." (Berman & Berger, p.

218) And to the point, the New York City shown in Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) is quite a departure from that depicted by Allen's New York. In Manhattan, the city of just a decade prior is awash in trips to the museum, professorial debates and fundraisers where erudite individuals discuss works of art and ideas of impermanence. These ideas of impermanence are never discussed in films such as Do the Right Thing, where instead such impermanence is felt in the chaos that seems ready to envelope the city.

As the text by Berman & Berger suggests to us, the transience of the city across the ten years between these two films is not driven so much by chronology as it is by privilege and the cultural vantage it allows. It is this very distinction which allows Allen to so eloquently rhapsodize a city that Lee portrays as a steaming hotbed for ethnic and racial tension.

Where Allen's character Isaac consorts with writers and socialites who have doormen and analysts, Mookie of Lee's film is ensconced by violence, hostility and a permeating sense of economic despair. From the perspective of those experiencing New York as a place of transience primarily for the despair and rootlessness it could instill in one, Allen's existential crises, his divorces and his writer's block could seem of superficial importance at best.

To those experiencing New York in the 70s and 80s as a place just on the edge of destruction if not beyond, the sense of it as a space so enormous that one could fall endlessly is palpable. An essay in the text compiled by Berman & Berger by Paul Kopasz suggests as much. As the author describes his life as an addict in the city, one begins to understand transience as something far more troubling than Allen's metaphysical quandaries.

Kopasz told that "I associated energy, dark violence, sex, and glamour with New York, and music embodied it all. There were many inexpensive places to live, and the poor and the people who wanted to be outside mainstream society lived there. Fourteen-year-old boys with terrifying faces lived next door to hapless musicians squatting for political reasons or because they were too strung out to hold down jobs." (Berman & Berger, p.

270) By a very sharp contrast, Allen's interaction with the city is represented by an academic disposition, an intellectual elitism and an experience in the city that was decidedly neurotic. But for those without privilege, the artistic and cultural density was experienced in a different way altogether, one with a self-destructive impermanence in place of Allen's neuroses. Quite ironically, we can be certain that auteurs such as Woody Allen were living in the same city and context as individuals like Kopasz because Kopasz assures us as much.

He notes that "I saw Woody Allen on the street on a regular basis. I walked on the same sidewalks and ate at the same restaurants and had my roots dyed and sat on the same park benches as the cool and famous did when they were slumming it." (p. 269) In a very compelling way, this underscores the manner in which.