The Mayor in Popular Culture
The New York City mayoralty has played a central role in several films and television series. Spin City (1996–2002), set in City Hall, it cast Barry Bostwick as the dim-witted mayor, but starred Michael J. Fox as a deputy mayor, whose primary task was to keep the mayor from embarrassing himself in front of the media and voters. City Hall (1996) starred Al Pacino as an idealistic mayor and John Cusack as his deputy mayor, who leads an investigation with unexpectedly far-reaching consequences into the accidental shooting of a boy in New York. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) features Lee Wallace as an indecisive, flu-struck mayor who is bullied by his deputy and booed by the citizenry. The comic-book series Ex Machina posits an alternate history in which the 2001 election is won by the independent Mitchell Hundred, a former superhero called the Great Machine, who sweeps to victory after saving the second tower of the World Trade Center on September 11. A fictional mayor is also featured in the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series.
Local tabloid newspapers often refer to the mayor as "Hizzoner", a corruption of the title "His Honor". Several mayors have appeared in television and movies, as well as on Broadway—most notably in The Will Rogers Follies. In the 1980s and 90s, Mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani had appeared on Saturday Night Live on several occasions, sometimes mocking themselves in sketches. Giuliani and Bloomberg have both appeared, as themselves in their mayoral capacities, on episodes of Law & Order. Giuliani has made cameos in films such as The Out-of-Towners and Anger Management. Bloomberg has appeared on 30 Rock and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
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Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, mayor, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The mayor and Montaigne have always been two, with a very clear separation. For all of being a lawyer or a financier, we must not ignore the knavery there is in such callings. An honest man is not accountable for the vice or stupidity of his trade, and should not therefore refuse to practice it.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)