Parting Glances, New York City
by Jack Diaz
M&MF
est. 03-10-24
est. 03-10-24
I have never seen the Avengers flying through the streets of Manhattan. I have never looked up to the clouds to find a superhuman, or a global disaster, or a giant monster decimating historic buildings in the blink of an eye. No one really looks up at the sky in New York City. Only the tourists, because everyone has somewhere to be. After living here for a couple of years, my eyes aren’t drawn skywards. They’re too busy reading traffic patterns and staring down at shoelaces, so no one slows down my walk to work. But every once in a while, I turn away from the endless steps and chatter and buzzing machinery all trying to get from stop to stop to stop, and I look up to the sky.
I always find a stillness up there.
The movies lie. They often do. The skies of the city, apart from those awful helicopters that bring nothing but trouble, are the most peaceful parts. Especially those slivers of blue nestled between old buildings, through the forgotten walkways that start to glow whenever the sun hits its peak. A meeting between the heavens and man’s best effort to reach them, a failure that captures the admirable futility of our species. Those spots are my favorite.
The way I look at New York City is always going to be different from the way the locals see it. I find remnants of my quiet hometown because I know what to look for, and they can recognize textures of life that I still haven’t discovered. Textures I might never know, despite passing through them on my way to work every day. Maybe all of the glitzy blockbusters make more sense to them, the grand sense of space and setting, the belief that everything is possible, and the fate of the world is constantly in the balance over the downtown skyscrapers.
I am not a blockbuster person; this comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever seen my work or talked to me for more than ten minutes. Maybe that’s why I struggle to see what the big-budget filmmakers see in this city, because my New York City is much closer to all the naturalistic independent pictures. Black and white stories of murmuring insecurity and the obnoxious twenty-somethings who speak loudly without much to say. I love Mutual Appreciation and The Sweet East because these are the people that I encounter. They don’t sell as many tickets, and I understand why. I like watching them, though.
I really like Parting Glances. It’s a 1980s film starring a young Steve Buscemi in one of his first screen roles. There’s a scene that takes place in a stairwell with him and Adam Nathan (who plays a gay Columbia freshman) that I find myself revisiting time and time again. Stairwells are one of the most important places in the city– usually the most private places for an important heart-to-heart or a quick mental breakdown. As Buscemi and Nathan leave the party, they do a little bit of both, with Nathan’s manic youth contending with Buscemi’s worn grimace, both infatuated with the same man, both getting farther and farther from him with every step. The younger one thinks he knows everything, and the older one knows he doesn’t know anything, and both of them are stuck in this same ugly stairwell wearing different faces.
The younger one runs out, and we never see him again. It’s those little moments that make up the city, the conversations that would never take place without this concrete jungle, if only because there’s nowhere else in the world that would produce these two people at this specific place in their lives. That’s what my New York looks like.
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