The City in Popular Culture
Because of its sheer size and cultural influence, New York has been the subject of many different, and often contradictory, portrayals in mass media. From the sophisticated and worldly metropolis seen in many Woody Allen films, to the hellish and chaotic urban jungle depicted in such movies as Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, New York has served as the backdrop for virtually every conceivable viewpoint on big city life.
In the early years of film, New York City was characterized as urbane and sophisticated. By the city's crisis period in the 1970s and early 1980s, however, films like Midnight Cowboy, The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, Marathon Man, Cruising, Dressed to Kill, and Death Wish showed New York as full of chaos and violence. With the city's renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s came new portrayals on television; Friends, Seinfeld, and Sex and the City showed life in the city to be glamorous and interesting. Nonetheless a disproportionate number of crime dramas, such as Law & Order, continue to make criminality in the city as their subject even as New York has become the safest large city in the United States in the last two decades.
An essay appearing in the Arts section of the New York Times in April 2006 quoted several filmmakers, including Sidney Lumet and Paul Mazursky, describing how modern cinema shows the city as far more "teeming, terrifying, exhilarating, unforgiving" than contemporary New York actually is, and the consequential challenge this poses for filmmakers. The article quotes Robert Greenhut, Woody Allen's producer, as saying that despite the increased sanitization of modern New York, "New Yorkers' personalities are different to Chicago. There's a certain kind of vibrancy and tone that you can't get elsewhere. The labor pool is more interesting than elsewhere — the salesgirl with one line, or the cop. That's who directors are looking for."
Gameloft developed a social simulation game entitled New York Nights: Success in the City which is set in the city.
James Sanders, editor of Scenes From the City: Filmmaking in New York, 1966–2006, is quoted in the article as predicting that future films in New York City will move away from the well-worn setting of upper-middle class Manhattan neighborhoods to the outer boroughs, where they will begin examining the crosscurrents emanating from ethnic neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
See also: Category:New York City in popular cultureRead more about this topic: Culture Of New York City
Famous quotes containing the words city, popular and/or culture:
“Our purpose in founding the city was not to make any one class in it surpassingly happy, but to make the city as a whole as happy as possible.”
—Socrates (469–399 B.C.)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)