A Book Review by John Talbird.
A sound, focused, and thorough examination of a fairly compressed period of time.”
On October 30, 1975, New York’s Daily News ran an article with the banner headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Of course, President Gerald Ford never said such a thing, few politicians would. He had given a speech the previous day denying the city federal assistance to prevent the bankruptcy it seemed to be heading toward. But according to The Times, that otherwise unmemorable speech, giving birth to afamous headline for an otherwise unmemorable article, would lead to Ford’s narrow loss to Jimmy Carter the following year. To add insult to injury, he would ultimately sign legislation to send federal loans to the city just two months after the speech anyway. But that title has taken an outsized place in the cultural memory of New York City from that era. I can’t count the number of times I’ve encountered that quote in articles or books exploring nearly any artistic output from the city up until 9/11. Two of them, I’ve reviewed for this very publication: Joan Hawkins’ anthology of essays, Downtown Film and TV Culture, 1975-2001 (2015)and Brian Tochterman’s The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear (2017).
Joining this impressive list of Ye Gritty Olde New York is Cortland Rankin’s Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York. Covering roughly the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, Rankin seems to be going for a universal theory of the city’s cinematic production from a time period that, depending on your point of view, is either the nadir or zenith of New York City. He pushes against the usual capitalistic vision of progress associated with NYC from that time period, the idea that the city, as most often cinematically embodied in Times Square, emerged from the dark ages of prostitutes, drug dealers, slum lords and mountains of trash into the broken-windows-policed and Wall Streetified shininess of Rudy Guiliani’s capitalistic paradise.
A universal theory might not be the right term. Perhaps a comprehensive compendium is more apt. Rankin takes us through not only the usual suspects – the NYC Hollywood Renaissance films of Scorsese, Cassavetes, Lumet et al. and Downtown art films like Downtown 81 (2000; see top image) and Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation (1980) – but also exploitation films (Shaft [1971], Black Caesar [1973], Deathwish [1974]), mainstream movies (West Side Story [1961], King Kong [1976], Crocodile Dundee [1986]), genre films (Wolfen [1981], Escape from New York [1981], C.H.U.D. [ 1984]), documentaries (Pigeons [1967], Style Wars [1983]), and avant-garde cinema (Walden [1969], Staten Island [1978]). The all-encompassing approach can give a “there’s this film and then this film and, oh right, this film,” feel to the read. However, Rankin’s chapter organization labors mightily to give an overall thematic shape to this project.
In 1982, social scientists George Kelling and James Wilson published “Broken Windows Theory” in The Atlantic Monthly. This article would prove influential in approaches to policing for much of the rest of the 20th century and beyond, inspiring commissioners all across the US, perhaps embodied most recently in the “stop and frisk” strategy utilized infamously in NYC, as cops targeted primarily Black and brown young men in an attempt to catch them with guns or drugs, searching many, many innocent people to find a few law-breakers. According to the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, between 2010 and 2012, Blacks and Latinos equaled 84 percent of all stops and only six percent were followed by an arrest. In 2011 alone, 700,000 stops were made, roughly eight percent of the population – that is, if each of those stops were distinct persons. But many of the same young men were stopped over and over, some even more than once in a day. Perhaps, to some people, this kind of inconvenience is a necessary evil in combating violent crime. But as Elizabeth Hinton and other historians and theorists of the American police industrial complex have shown, this strategy is a violent one that leads to more violence. Just watch the Eric Garner video to get an idea about how some people can melt down from all of this harassment and watch it all the way through to see what the cost of control often is. The original broken windows theory argues that small, quality-of-life infractions – such as littering, jay-walking, jumping the turnstile in the subway or, Garner’s offense, selling untaxed cigarettes – lead to “disorder” (26) and more serious violent crimes.
In Rankin’s first chapter “Broken Windows, Broken People,” he describes what he calls the cinema of decline—films which use location shooting in NYC “derelict space.” These locations were in every borough, but especially the South Bronx and Lower Manhattan where “disused industrial sites, abandoned residential and commercial buildings, and vacant lots” (14) were useful zones for depicting violence, criminality, and other deviant behavior as if the spaces themselves gave rise to this behavior. The cinema of decline, according to Rankin, began to appear in the late sixties and early seventies, dovetailing with Kelling and Wilson’s article so that the general public, after over a decade of these types of films, was ready and prepared to believe this proposition, though, like most false cause fallacies – marijuana is a “gateway drug” to harder narcotics, gangsta rap inspires real-life violence – it was a gross oversimplification of complex sociohistorical and economic circumstances at best and an excuse to control Black and brown people at worst. Rankin offers many examples of the cinema of decline – from Hollywood Renaissance films like The French Connection which shot on location in a still operational crematorium (which ironically is depicted as abandoned and decrepit in the film) to the bleak pseudo realism of Fort Apache: The Bronx (1981) (the South Bronx) to exploitation films like Shaft’s Big Score! (the Brooklyn Navy Yard before its recent gentrification, actually also playing the South Bronx).
Although many have written about this era’s NYC crime and exploitation cinema, Rankin brings a fresh perspective to his second chapter, “It’s a Jungle Out There: The City in Decline as Wilderness,” analyzing the depiction of the city’s green spaces and also the outsider – the cowboy, the “savage,” the monster – in the city. He writes about how nature in the city – particularly Central Park – is depicted as “wild” space, unsafe and untamed, and about how this wildness acts as both a metaphor and synecdoche for the wildness of the city (in decline) as a whole. This wildness appears in both comedies such as the Neil Simon adaptation, The Out-of-Towners (1970), about a Midwestern couple in the city for the weekend who encounter one mishap after another until they find themselves without money or food in Central Park, and also psychological thrillers like William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), about a cop played by Al Pacino whose search for a serial killer targeting the men in the city’s gay leather scene takes him into the park. Both films, though wildly varying in tone, set climatic scenes in the Ramble (Rankin calls it “the Rambles”) which depict this intentionally wild space as dangerous, unpredictable, and out of human control.
In a compelling section of the book, Rankin looks at films about wild beasts invading the city. He gives a particularly nuanced reading of the original Planet of the Apes (1968), pointing out that while it simultaneously taps into white fears of urban areas becoming dangerous and “wild,” that the apes in the film are civilized while humans are wild beasts:
…in the eyes of the orangutan Minister for Science Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) man is a pest who lays waste to whatever lands he occupies. “The sooner he is exterminated, the better,” he remarks. Zaius’ assumption is of course proven correct in the film’s final twist where Taylor’s [Charlton Heston] discovery of a ruined Statue of Liberty reveals not only that he has been on Earth all along, but that humanity ultimately did destroy itself” (61).
He also analyzes Death Wish 3 which presents a multiethnic gang of “punk-inspired versions of Indians on the warpath” (63) in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood. In fact, many of these films borrow from the Western cinema. Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979) presents the titular gang, also multiethnic, in beaded necklaces, moccasins, and feathers. But as Rankin demonstrates, “each member is developed as an individual in ways that court, but also subvert stereotypes” avoiding depicting them as simply “savage or animalistic” (65). Likewise, monster movies are represented here too with John Guillermin’s 1976 remake of King Kong which simultaneously channels fear of urban “wildness” and examines anxieties about climate change and human greed. The expedition which captures Kong is surveying Skull Island as a possible site for oil drilling. Unlike the Empire State Building in the original, this Kong scales the just-completed Twin Towers which are a graphic match for the stone columns on Skull Island which is Kong’s lair.
One strength of Rankin’s book is that he often problematizes and complicates accepted readings. In the third chapter, “At Home and at Play,” he writes about the ways in which NYC’s derelict spaces have been used as alternative sites for artists, LGBTQ, and other “outsiders,” both in real life and in fictional cinema. He reads both independent cinema like Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation and more mainstream fare like Times Square (1980), noticing, like others before him, that sites of urban decay that are presented as dangerous and foreboding in the cinema of decline become spaces of creativity and havens for nonconformists and “others” in these films. However, he faults films like Times Square for depicting decrepit neighborhoods in NYC as playgrounds for oddball nonconformists without acknowledging the people who already live there and ignoring issues of race and gentrification:
These films largely configure such spaces as “virgin land” where white characters who might not fit in elsewhere can reinvent themselves along countercultural lines. However, no attention is given to the businesses, industries, and communities that were displaced to make room for these newly christened sanctuary spaces. Instead, they are “always already” empty, ripe for the taking (96).
The second half of the book deals with the “reimagination” of the city, the way certain directors and artists pushed back against the decline narrative of NYC. Interestingly, as Rankin argues throughout, this is not a simple A-to-Z progression moving from apocalyptic decline narratives of loss to the stories which reimagine the city. We have early experimental films like Jack Smith’s Scotch Tape (1962) which positions performers in the “remnants of San Juan Hill as the area was being razed to make way for Lincoln center” (136). But then sixteen years later we also have a mainstream film like Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz (1978) partly staging an Oz set inside the Tent of Tomorrow, an abandoned building at Flushing Meadows, Queens on the site of the 1964-65 World’s Fair. And graffiti was a means of reshaping and reimagining the city, a democratic canvas and a resistance to an increasingly repressive police force. This new subculture was dramatized and explored in such varying texts as the art film Downtown 81, the documentary Style Wars, and the hip-hop film Wild Style (1983).
Finally, in Rankin’s last chapter, he reads mainstream and experimental films which rethink the natural spaces of NYC. The two musicals Godspell (1973) and Hair (1979) “fully reimagine the city’s parks, and Central Park in particular, as spaces for forging alternative social models” (175). Particularly interesting are the examples of experimental and documentary features which represent and reimagine Central Park in relation to the city and its inhabitants. William Greaves’s self-reflexive experimental documentary, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), breaks its own narrative, shifts perspectives, challenges assumptions about reality, and shifts between fiction and nonfiction. All that is stable, the film seems to be saying, is the park/nature. As Greaves – playing himself – says in the course of the film:
This film will tell itself. This film is about us, about the cast, crew, and onlooker, about us all as part of nature, and nature has its own story to tell. Our problem, or rather my problem, is to get out of nature’s way and let nature tell her story. That’s what a good director is – a person who gets his ego out of his own way, he is at best a collaborator and servant of nature…who paradoxically, firmly controls the conditions of spontaneity, theatricality, and drama on the set (183).
In addition, Rankin examines how Jonas Mekas’s Walden blurs and problematizes the usual dichotomy between the constructed and natural presented and assumed about NYC, especially in its use of the soundtrack where the sound of the subway rushing by is juxtaposed against the cinematography of pastoral images of Central Park.
In Rankin’s epilogue, he brings us up to the present, glossing newer New York films like the 1999 remake of The Out-of-Towners, films from the New Black Cinema of the late 1980s to early 1990s (New Jack City [1991], Juice [1992], Clockers [1995]), Abel Ferrara’s crime films, and Joker (2019) among others. He juxtaposes this mainstream and indie fare against experimental videos like Muhheakantuck – Everything Has a Name (2003), Mannahatta (1999-2009), and Welikia (2010-13), films without theatrical releases, only shown in museums. There is something very bracing about this final brief analysis of where the story of NYC has come since the mid-1980s, but it also brings up a question that had been lurking around the edges of my consciousness throughout the reading of the rest of the book. For a book of barely over 200 pages, there are a lot of films here – from the mainstream to the obscure to the esoteric and hard-to-see. The same people aren’t watching many of these films, audiences don’t overlap. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be discussed in conjunction with each other, but I would have liked to see some theoretical wrestling with issues of reception and production. What does it mean to make and/or consume racist and/or fearful stories of the city? What does it mean to resist these narratives in composition and who are the people watching these alternative stories? At moments, despite the setting of NYC, it’s hard not to wonder if we’re comparing apples and oranges.
That said, ultimately Decline and Reimagination is a sound, focused, and thorough examination of a fairly compressed period of time. A first book, I suspect that it is a reworked dissertation. Though they often don’t make very cohesive books, Rankin does a pretty good job here of staying focused, engaging, and fresh, linking the chapters together nicely, concluding strong. There are few of the redundancies that often appear in those kinds of books. As a professor of film myself, I read a chapter, any of these chapters, and think, “Wow, that would make a great subject for a class.” It makes me think that I would have liked to see a book focusing on just one of the subtopics raised in one of these chapters in a more in-depth fashion. Either that or a book five times as long. Maybe the next will reveal the promise that this one hints at.
John Talbird is the author of the novel The World Out There (Madville Publishing, 2020) and a chapbook, A Modicum of Mankind (Norte Maar, 2016). His fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Potomac Review, Ambit, Juked, The Literary Review, and Riddle Fence among many others. He is Associate Editor, Fiction, for Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon is on the editorial board of Green Hills Literary Lantern. A professor at Queensborough Community College-CUNY, he lives with his wife and son in New York City.