Manhattan Transience and Privilege in Essay

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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.

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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 privilege will come to define the way that one characterizes the metropolitan experience. The psychic transience that Allen describes centers on the shifting dynamics of his personal relationships, the persistence of his unsatisfied career aspirations and even an ambition to remain true to his intellectual self in the face of social, romantic and professional pressures. These all promote a sense of impermanence that is largely existential in nature and points toward questions of purpose. But as a study of New York's cinematic depictions are concerned, these seem the problems and province of the decidedly wealthy and fortunate. For those living in the world's of Spike Lee's films, or Kopasz' drug bohemia, for instance, there would be little opportunity to reflect on such concerns. Transience here involved instead the flux based on overdosing, gang shootings, property destruction through violence or property dilapidation through neglect.

Conclusion:

While New York retains a sort of universal enormity that functions as the backdrop to any narrative contextualized by the city, wide variances in the experience of those living there within are responsible for highly stratified film representations. And because these experiences divide across lines of privilege, it seems likely that as many things as are likely to change in the ever-transient space of the city, the diversity of perspectives defining the city experience is likely always to be a significant artistic and cultural presence.

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