Whit Stillman's Gloriously Lonely New York City

Time to put on Metropolitan

It’s a constant struggle trying to find movies that Emily and I agree on. We could spend an hour talking about what’s available, only to hit an impasse that leads one of us to suggest we just keep watching The Sopranos (her first time seeing it, my 4th or 5th) or fire up any episode of 30 Rock that we’ve likely both seen umpteen times. But I suppose the other night was different enough with all the fatigue from months of election talk and then the post-November 5th tsunami of takes and New York Times alerts we couldn’t escape no matter how hard we tried. So when she suggested Wolfs, I think I yelped, yes, sure, please. At the very least, a movie with George Clooney and Brad Pitt promised to be charming no matter what the film was about. Fixers who both get put on the same job? That had at least a 40 percent chance of screwball fun, and the bar was really low for what would help me escape the real world. So we put it on, and I figured I’d doze off; in the end, I enjoyed the movie. It’s one of those things people will ask “Is it good” with a pained face, because they’d likely heard otherwise. I won’t go to the mattresses for Wolfs; I’ll just repeat that I enjoyed it.

But there was something about the Jon Watts-directed film that—yes—I thought was good. And the more I think about it, the more I suspect that the New York City Pitt and Clooney’s characters traverse is purposely lonely and empty of at least 75 percent of the people you’d normally see if you walked around it. It ties into the theme that the stars are playing lone wolves who are just lonely guys and gives the movie a little noir-ish quality, but it’s also hauntingly beautiful in a way you don’t see New York City shot much these days. Some of my favorite NYC movies lean into the loneliness of the city—the empty streets of SoHo in After Hours to the ghost town of an Upper West Side street Kevin McCallister’s aunt and uncle own a building on that would likely fetch eight figures today in Home Alone 2 both spring to mind—but watching Wolfs in the middle of November reminded me that it’s the time of the year when it’s inevitable that I’ll end up deciding that I need to rewatch Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan.

Odd jump, right? You’re probably reading this and saying the two films have absolutely nada in common, and you’re totally right. It was simply the lonely NYC streets that had me connecting one with the other, and I’m sure the big budget Wolfs was able to pay to have the city streets and sidewalks cleared, while it was organic for Stillman’s 1990 debut feature that cost $210,000 to make. But I’ll take it where I can get it in these days of seeing lines out the door almost anywhere you go in Manhattan. People hear even the slightest whisper of “TikTok-famous Williamsburg pizza new West Village location” and they’ll wait 30 or 40 minutes behind a hundred other folks for a slice that isn’t that unlike the one they could get across the street in four minutes and for a few bucks less. I don’t get it, but I’m old.

Stillman’s Manhattan is quiet and almost quaint. True, it still does empty out a little around Christmas these days, but it’s nothing like what you see in the film that turns 34 this year. The metropolis of Metropolitan is occupied almost entirely by locals only, and Edward Clements’ Tom Townsend is a lonely guy who haunts a debutante ball because school is out and there isn’t much else to do. I’ve watched the film so many times over the years, and the thing I never expected was the thing I’d be drawn to was the feeling of cityscape solitude. It’s an odd evolution for me: I’ve been described by my wife as “extremely extroverted.” And to be honest, that change worried me a little, because I didn’t want to become one of those guys who become withdrawn as they age. But the more I thought about it, the idea of being lonely in one of the busiest cities in the world is a nice little luxury. It’s one that I don’t want to enjoy that much, but I didn’t have a hard time remembering the last few times I actually felt alone in New York City.

In the early days of the pandemic, I couldn’t stop looking at the copy of Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City that was on the bookshelf next to my desk. I tried to rally people to start a “quarantine bookclub” with me where we’d read it and discuss it nightly over Zoom. The idea fizzled out fast; the combination of trying to figure out how to live day to day and also fighting off the crushing sadness of watching the death toll rise made it difficult to keep it going. I’d already read and loved Laing’s account of trying to get used to living in New York City by juxtaposing her own memoir of life in the city with the stories of others who lived there before her who had also experienced or portrayed loneliness in their work and felt defeated that I couldn’t get the club going. I put my copy down, ignored the e-mails asking when the club would start, and started watching all of Cheers.

But thinking about loneliness and literally only having one person around for all that—albeit, my wife, whose company I enjoy very much—had me wondering how to best embrace the solitude. If you were here in the spring of 2020, you might recall that it was chilly well into May; add in the lack of knowing how Covid was transmitted and the constant barrage of sirens, and even going outside felt like you were about to end up in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The only thing that kept me hopeful, oddly, was a series of videos I found that just showed a camera shot from various windows across Manhattan, and the sounds coming from the street. Nothing happens besides lights flash, horns honk, and sometimes you’ll hear the occasional siren or police whistle. You don’t see or hear anybody and it’s chaotic the way everything around NYC is, but I dare anybody to tell me it isn’t as comforting as ASMR videos or the white noise machine we use to get our baby to sleep. I’d put those on loop for hours at a time, and I felt about as good as one could feel during a world-crippling pandemic.

When the pandemic restrictions started to ease and we (hopefully) all got the vaccines, I took every chance I could to see people in person. I was so sick of faces on Zoom, especially since my second book came out in August of 2020 and I did an entire “book tour” on that damned videoconferencing app. I obviously wasn’t the only one who felt like they needed to be around other humans as much as possible once it was deemed safe, and I enjoyed seeing people interacting with each other again—for a bit. After about a year or so, it looked to me like it was less about being around other people and more about being in the right places, around the right people so you could take pictures or make videos of it. Not long after that, I started hearing the dreaded phrase “TikTok blew this place up” about everywhere from some bakery that had recently opened up to institutions like Katz’s and Bemelmans Bar. It was funny at first, but then it shot to the top of the list of the most annoying things imaginable.

It hasn’t stopped. I was in Manhattan last Saturday afternoon and felt like I was escaping Transylvania just as the sun was going down and the vampires started showing up. The Lyft I was in went up Canal and there was line after line, people waiting to get into some streetwear shop banging into people waiting to get into an ice cream place even though it was definitely autumn cold out. I wondered who the fuck all the people were. I assumed they were from out of town, but I plenty of people who “live” here do so in a very Gang of 4 “At Home He’s a Tourist” way. People who are just passing through until they can’t afford the rent, there’s a new place that’s supposedly cooler, or they’re students. I assume anybody who wears anything from the brand New York or Nowhere will eventually pick the latter, that somebody will have to start a brand called “I Swear Westport is Cool” or “Don’t Make Fun of Connecticut” so those people will have a way to show off where they pay taxes.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time by myself. I don’t like working in public and start to feel filthy if I need to take my laptop out in a coffee shop. I have my nice little office in my apartment, and I take walks when I’m not working. Sometimes I’ll get lunch with a friend, and I generally stay within my zipcode during the weekdays. I haven’t worked in an actual office space as part of a “team” since 2020, and yes, sometimes I miss it. Being around people was nice—sometimes—but the real draw was I always worked in Manhattan. These days, I treat going into the city the way my father used to talk about going there from The Bronx or the way John Travolta stares out at the skyline from Verrazzano Bridge like it’s some distant land that would require days or weeks to journey to. It’s an event: The Big Apple, Gotham, concrete jungle where dreams are made of, etc. But when I get there, the disappointment takes over within an hour or so. There are just too many people walking too slow, filming themselves, or waiting on long lines that I have to push past because they want to try some mid bagel place.

The curse every New Yorker has to live with is that sooner or later, you become that grump who kvetches about change and how the city isn’t as good as it used to be. I do my best to not engage with that sort of talk because I know this place is always changing for the better and worse at the same time, but I can’t help feel like there’s a big bubble that’s about to burst, and maybe things will quiet down. It won’t be good for the city when it happens, but it might also end up being the best thing for it in the long-run. I don’t know; I can’t tell the future. All I know is that I’ve been looking for that feeling of city solitude anywhere I can find it, and I know I’ll feel a little of it when I watch Metropolitan this weekend.